Michele Montserrat wrote this wonderful feedback about "East Hollywood" which goes live as an ebook today on Amazon.com!
"Ted Dewberry has a book coming out on Amazon this coming Friday the 15th. Got a chance to read a pre-pub version and here's my review. Enjoy!
This is an unflinching look at the frenzied, fast food and sex-soaked world and home life of Dr. Tulare, a medical doctor practicing in Los Angeles, California and a frequent patron of Heretic Mountain for magical spells, black and otherwise. His son, Ted Tulare, does the best he can to cope with his father’s revolving crew of ex-con girlfriends, prostitutes, drug addicts and other sketchy characters who set up camp at their rented apartment in East Hollywood. Still dealing with the aftermath of his mother’s death by an overdose a number of years ago, the boy roams LA with his best friend Jerome, and dreams of the day when his dad will give him the Caddy on his 16th birthday. With the help of liberal doses of alcohol, movies, and weed, the boy is able to tune out some of the unrelenting chaos of his father’s home, while highlighting the food, culture, and street life of LA in 1984. Mr. Dewberry has done a great job of capturing a miasma of domestic abuse and neglect, leavened with a dark, wry humor – along with many, many scenes of chili cheese fries and chicken.
From the moment the book begins, a creeping despair unfolds. East Hollywood is not a happy, well-lit room. This frank and brutal tale of a father who has no qualms of inflicting his lifestyle on his child will not be the cup of tea for the reader who prefers their fiction light and upbeat. If you aren’t in the mood for a midnight coming-of-age tale, keep browsing the e-book listings.
But, before you take a pass on East Hollywood, consider - sometimes it can be fun to see how each fresh hell unfolds. Suspense and horror films continue to do great box office, and this book appeals to that artistic sentiment. Dewberry keeps the narrative moving with just the right touch of humor to keep the reader engaged, wondering just exactly how the boy deals with the train wreck his home has become under the narcissistic Dr. Tulare. So, while I found myself cringing to read such lines as “The chicken was hot with grease pockets that spurted on your face like a porn star,” and “Stayed at the hotel with this blonde with the biggest tits in Glendale.” Then I was delighted as the story shifts through humor, and then turns lyrical; the emotional wonder of the boy’s first trip to Yosemite, and his musing on the “…sweet dreams of Santa Ana winds and the trees with fragrant purple flowers that lined Prospect Avenue." Many moments like these lift this story out of the mire, and I appreciated both their beauty and the space they leave in the narrative for the reader to catch the breath.
Finally, toward the end of the book, the threatening and ominous people out on the streets of LA are seen with new eyes by Tulare’s son. He muses then how the prostitutes and drug dealers and colorful characters are actually the engine of life and color on the street, a world that will too soon be sadly gone, eaten up by the march of gentrification; “All of that would be eviscerated from East Hollywood. It would be bought up and processed. It would, itself be made into the whore of the corporate world, looking like any other street in any other city.”
East Hollywood. A gritty, witty journey through the heartbreak of family dysfunction. I know I was left sad, wondering, disgusted, and laughing by turns. Sometimes it’s good to read a story like that. A wild ride which I recommend."
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