Publishers Weekly
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Smiley (A Dangerous Business) follows the life of a budding folk rock singer in her tender if uneven latest. While Jodie Rattler is studying at Penn State in the 1960s, one of her songs becomes a surprise hit, leading to gigs in Los Angeles and New York City. She relishes her success and takes to the bed-hopping bohemian lifestyle while resisting pressure from her record label to drop out of college. Memories of her idyllic childhood in 1950s St. Louis are ever-present, as are those of her steadfast determination to succeed as a teenager, setting her apart from a bookish high school classmate, whom she refers to only as the “gawky girl.” The gawky girl, a clear stand-in for Smiley, makes periodic appearances—while in England to play a festival, Jodie espies her in a park. It’s a clever touch, and the sly metafictional mirroring represents the creative wit the author is known for. What’s riling, however, is Smiley’s choice to extend the narrative into the future—in an epilogue, a panicked Jodie struggles to survive in an apocalyptic future America. Still, Smiley pulls off moving scenes of Jodie’s reconnecting with her St. Louis family, as Jodie reckons with the bonds that formed her. Though Smiley is known for snappier work than this one, it’s plenty engrossing. (Apr.)

Library Journal
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Best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Smiley (A Dangerous Business) has written many well-received works but her most recent novel falls flat. The life story of Jodie Rattler, the novel covers decades of the folk musician's life, starting with her childhood in St. Louis. Her family's passion for music fuels and supports Jodie's own passion. Smiley embellishes Jodie's story through references to trends in pop culture and to artists such as Judy Collins, which provides some frame of reference for Jodie's successful-enough career. She earns a solid income, which her uncle invests wisely on her behalf. She is able to travel extensively across the United Stated and even abroad before returning to St. Louis. What's not successful is a plodding narrative with little or no action and less-than-robust character development. Then along comes an epilogue with a twist involving a gawky girl whom Jodie occasionally encounters after beginning her career. VERDICT The final twist and thus the novel fail in large part because the epilogue introduces an abrupt structural shift and an unsatisfying change in narrative voice for which readers are not well-prepared and which takes the book in a different direction.—Faye A. Chadwell

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A stroll through recent American history with a modestly successful singer-songwriter. More than three-quarters of Jodie Rattler’s account of her life is a straightforward realistic text, spiked with dry Midwestern humor, about growing up in St. Louis with a single mother supported by a close-knit extended family. Jodie has been lucky, she tells us, since age 6, when her uncle took her to the racetrack and gave her a share of his winnings. That $86 roll stays with her through a musical career that she never has to work at very hard, thanks to a novelty Christmas hit she wrote while still in college in 1969. The royalties bankroll her through the next half-century, including a long trip with a serious love affair in England and a bohemian residency in New York enlivened by 23 lovers (she kept a list). Jodie’s down-to-earth descriptions of writing songs, cutting a few albums, and singing with various bands is reminiscent of Smiley’s nuts-and-bolts dissection of fiction writing in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), as is her blunt narrative voice. Her creator riffs on this similarity with running appearances by “the gawky girl” Jodie knew slightly in high school, unmistakably Smiley, though her name is never mentioned. St. Louis (Smiley’s real-life hometown) is the lovingly rendered setting for the most moving scenes after Jodie moves back to care for her aging grandparents and alcoholic mother. The rest of the locales are more generic, as are the current events dropped in to situate Jodie’s experiences chronologically. At its close, the novel takes an apocalyptic leap into the near future that matches Smiley’s darkest pages in A Thousand Acres (1991) and The Greenlanders (1988). This abrupt change of tone is presumably intended to spotlight the way extremes of every variety from climactic to political have become the norm, but it makes for a jarring conclusion to an otherwise low-key novel. Intelligent and tough-minded, as Smiley’s work always is, but capped by an oddly disjunctive finale. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

One fine day, six-year-old Jodie Rattler, growing up fatherless with her reticent mother in St. Louis, picks winning horses for her sweet Uncle Drew in a life-shaping stroke of luck. Entranced by music, Jodie becomes a gifted singer and songwriter at the start of the folk-rock era. Her luck holds with a recording session, a tour, and hit songs. Thanks to her ever-wealthier uncle's smart investments, she's able to live off the royalties, free to work only when she wants to. Smiley neatly reverses the usual story of a 1970s singer. Instead of the drama of wild partying and angst-ridden ambition, Jodie lives a tranquil life. She is a solitary being, happiest taking long, ruminating walks, carefully observing everything around her. Smiley has fun writing her protagonist's smart song lyrics, but it is the lingering, poetic, all-but excessively detailed descriptions of every setting and turn of mind that make this slow-brewing, meditative tale of temperament, choice, and creativity spellbinding. Jodie has casual affairs, falls in love with a royal in England, buys a cabin in the Catskills, and ends up back in her beloved St. Louis to care for family, ever so often recording a new album. Then, just as the curtain is about to fall on this musing, compassionate, gently rueful, and melancholy artist, Smiley orchestrates a seismic twist of staggering magnitude.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Every novel by Smiley is a surprise, and her ardent readership will be intrigued by her latest.