At a pizza place in uptown Minneapolis, scenesters and a psychic try very hard to find the next cool party and a pure state of punk living in the summating year of 1989. Their overripe imaginations (and beer) bring out bizarre fatal accidents, memories of once being devil possessed, and a vengeful ghost of a hippie who had overdosed.
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A review by S. Deeth "Sheila Deeth"
Punk Minneapolis
Peter Joseph Swanson is an expert at telling story and creating place through dialog. His characters become real almost as soon as they open their mouths, and they open their mouths a lot. They talk about the world, politics, drugs, imagination, drink, drugs, clothes, music, drink, drugs... They cook pizza. They sell pizza. They fasten the rips in their garments with safety pins that are so out of style. Oh, and they swear, because they're real, and real almost-grown-ups in uptown Minneapolis at the end of the 80s talked like that. I believe it, because it's so convincingly and powerfully told.
There are some truly classic conversations in this book. Can the F-word be used in a home-grown movie to be shown on cable TV? Is it, indeed, a catch-all safety word that avoids offending people, or a hugely taboo offensive word that sends old ladies into fits? Or can it be both? Do cultures clash? Of course they do. But this novel invites the reader into a culture that really isn't trying to clash with anything, just to find its roots and exist.
There's symbolism too--Peter Joseph Swanson is a master of modern symbolism. Drug-hazed images appear and reappear. Events are told through the eyes of truly unreliable narrators, and they ebb and flow into patterns and logical conclusions.
Quick judgments about these characters would be more flawed than the characters themselves. Superficial on the surface, they all have intriguing depths, curious pasts perhaps or futures, dreams and very human desires. Best of all, the author weaves them into a story that has its own path through the waning year of the decade. A long-awaited party forms a focus for even-longer-hidden mysteries. The images paint themselves from corners to center, fill the page, and the movie is done. Then a quiet epilogue frames the whole tale with pitch-perfect narration.
Punk Minneapolis
Peter Joseph Swanson is an expert at telling story and creating place through dialog. His characters become real almost as soon as they open their mouths, and they open their mouths a lot. They talk about the world, politics, drugs, imagination, drink, drugs, clothes, music, drink, drugs... They cook pizza. They sell pizza. They fasten the rips in their garments with safety pins that are so out of style. Oh, and they swear, because they're real, and real almost-grown-ups in uptown Minneapolis at the end of the 80s talked like that. I believe it, because it's so convincingly and powerfully told.
There are some truly classic conversations in this book. Can the F-word be used in a home-grown movie to be shown on cable TV? Is it, indeed, a catch-all safety word that avoids offending people, or a hugely taboo offensive word that sends old ladies into fits? Or can it be both? Do cultures clash? Of course they do. But this novel invites the reader into a culture that really isn't trying to clash with anything, just to find its roots and exist.
There's symbolism too--Peter Joseph Swanson is a master of modern symbolism. Drug-hazed images appear and reappear. Events are told through the eyes of truly unreliable narrators, and they ebb and flow into patterns and logical conclusions.
Quick judgments about these characters would be more flawed than the characters themselves. Superficial on the surface, they all have intriguing depths, curious pasts perhaps or futures, dreams and very human desires. Best of all, the author weaves them into a story that has its own path through the waning year of the decade. A long-awaited party forms a focus for even-longer-hidden mysteries. The images paint themselves from corners to center, fill the page, and the movie is done. Then a quiet epilogue frames the whole tale with pitch-perfect narration.
From Impact Magazine, online: http://www.impactonline.co/reviews/318-punk-minneapolis
Author: Peter Joseph Swanson
Publisher: Stone Garden.net Publishing
Price: £12.95
Availability: Out Now
I never know where author Peter Joseph Swanson will take me when I open one of his books. Punk Minneapolis opens with seemingly vacuous young adults extolling the virtues of beer and the punk music scene in 1989. Each person wants to be cooler and more ‘punkier’ than the next. The majority of the characters work together in an uptown pizza parlour and enjoy spending their time off together as well. As hard as these fictional beings seem to fight against the mainstream, the more obvious it becomes that they feel a need to belong.
Once the reader gets through the first few pages of mindless character jabber and cursing, the story begins to pick up steam. The eccentric characters of a deranged, levitating nun, a thirty-something punk “mystic”, and an angry ghost take the pizza parlour clan on a wild adventure. The book is great fun; the characters are hilarious. A surprisingly poignant epilogue both ties up loose ends and leaves the reader wondering what happened to their own adventurous younger selves. I believe we have yet only been given a taste of the author’s complex talents.
Anyone familiar with the U.S. “twin” cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the state of Minnesota will find a lot of familiar references (I briefly lived on Hennepin Avenue myself), as will anyone remotely aware of punk music in 1989. The book is filled with references pertinent to the 1980s, which I found especially enjoyable. I was the only teen in my rural Midwestern town with a Sex Pistols album, and it seemed that parts of the book were a personal wink and nod to me.
9/10
Jill McDole
Author: Peter Joseph Swanson
Publisher: Stone Garden.net Publishing
Price: £12.95
Availability: Out Now
I never know where author Peter Joseph Swanson will take me when I open one of his books. Punk Minneapolis opens with seemingly vacuous young adults extolling the virtues of beer and the punk music scene in 1989. Each person wants to be cooler and more ‘punkier’ than the next. The majority of the characters work together in an uptown pizza parlour and enjoy spending their time off together as well. As hard as these fictional beings seem to fight against the mainstream, the more obvious it becomes that they feel a need to belong.
Once the reader gets through the first few pages of mindless character jabber and cursing, the story begins to pick up steam. The eccentric characters of a deranged, levitating nun, a thirty-something punk “mystic”, and an angry ghost take the pizza parlour clan on a wild adventure. The book is great fun; the characters are hilarious. A surprisingly poignant epilogue both ties up loose ends and leaves the reader wondering what happened to their own adventurous younger selves. I believe we have yet only been given a taste of the author’s complex talents.
Anyone familiar with the U.S. “twin” cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the state of Minnesota will find a lot of familiar references (I briefly lived on Hennepin Avenue myself), as will anyone remotely aware of punk music in 1989. The book is filled with references pertinent to the 1980s, which I found especially enjoyable. I was the only teen in my rural Midwestern town with a Sex Pistols album, and it seemed that parts of the book were a personal wink and nod to me.
9/10
Jill McDole