Wonder Valley

This book started off strong, full of promise. More specifically, it starts with a naked man running down the freeway in L.A. morning traffic. Bizarre enough, made even more strange by a man who puts his car in park and chases after him. You know, at some point, their stories will intertwine. You hope it's worth the wait.

Then, it's really not.

This is a tricky one for me, as I was interested enough in this book to get through it in just a couple of days. I wanted to see how all these stories came together. But, as the pages wore on, I had a feeling I would be disappointed. 

Wonder Valley jumps from character to character, from one time frame to another. It's easy to follow and the writing is good. The storylines are interesting enough: a rich white girl who screws up and leaves her life, only to end up in a cult-ish compound in the desert; a young black man, recently released from jail, who came west to LA to find his mom; a pair of wandering criminals who only have each other; that naked guy, who is the son of the man who leads that desert cult; and, the guy who runs after him in traffic, trying to escape the mundane day-to-day that is his life.

They're all connected - loosely. They all have pasts from which they can't escape. They're all running away from something and to something. But, it takes too long to make those connections. And, their backstories - more interested than their present, in my opinion - are too quickly glossed over to give the characters any depth.

It feels like there's a good story in here in each of the characters, but combining them did a disservice to them all.

You know what it reminds me of? Those Garry Marshall movies that have come out in recent years, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Because he's Garry freaking Marshall, he gets these amazing superstars to be in his movies, then he jumbles them all together into a blockbuster movie. The actors are fantastic, but the movies fall flat. No offense to Garry Marshall. 

Like those movies, I still made it through this book. But, I don't see it as the "classic LA novel" it's made out to be.

Maybe it needed more naked guy.