A very drawn out and complicated mystery with little pay off. I left feeling a little cheated. ( )

Eddie Alley, a child in rural Virginia, aspires to be more than a country boy after a writer and his female photographer friend come into his life. Tucker, the writer, comes under Eddie's mother's sorcery and never leaves and many years later is discovered to have died there. Even so, he has a larger than life influence on Eddie.
Several themes recur...the homeless boy, Eddie, taken in by Eddie's future wife's family and then the homeless boy, Jasper, taken in by Eddie; the witchcraft and sorcery theme seems to pass from Grandmother Cora Alley to Eddie's daughter, Wallis; the fascination with "monster" movies is passed on from Tucker to Eddie and then to Jasper. All characters make a desperate attempt to find themselves.
My response to this book is mixed. I often had to read passages for a second time to fully grasp the content. It is certainly not a book to pick up for pleasure reading. If you want a book that is thought provoking and intense this is the book for you.
( )

Another mystical realism novel - I am on a tear! They have all been good, this one was by the author of The Dress Lodger, a book I read for the Robert Adams lectures and enjoyed. This novel is VERY different! I enjoyed it, but found somethings vague and unclear. Sometimes mysterious is just confusing. ( )

Like the Frankenstein monster, the book is assembled from several plot lines that don't mesh very well. Her writing is fantastic, but it doesn't make up for what a mess this is.

Later note - I 'unstarred'. Cathleen Schine's review in the NYRB and several days of thinking about the book has altered my opinion some. It seems more of an ambitious failure now. But I don't want my low review to put off anyone else wanting to read it.

Well, this was unexpected.

So I thought this was going to be about witches and such. In a way, it is, but really, it's as non-witchy as a book about some people who may be witches gets. What do I mean? I mean, if you LOVE witch stuff like some people LOVE vampire stuff, I don't think this book is for you. Instead, it's a book for those who like multi-generational family sagas, old horror flicks, coming-of-age stories...

The story does skip around between 1940, when a couple on a government project to write a travel guide-like book with photos accidentally meet a boy and his mother, who live up in the woods. The 1980s are told mostly by the teenage daughter of this boy, who is now a grown man, in fact, a TV host for a horror-film show. And in some recent past (say the 2000s) the grown up daughter as well as her ailing father remember the good old days. So there are roughly 3 times the story takes place (there are some others, like when the girl's mother, Ann, talks about when she met her husband and when his mother died, etc)

The whole family saga is well done. Characters are all extremely well developed. Holman takes her time with descriptions of people and places. Some of her language is haunting. Towards the end, there are bits where it gets a bit too preachy for my taste, but this is not unrealistic. This is confession time for some of the characters, so it is expected and it is not out of place.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the book is that it is ultimately very sad. Not in that make-you-cry kind of sad, but more like that's-the-way-life-is kind of way. A simple girl crush can seem childish just a few days after some things happen in a teenagers life. An old shack in the woods, which meant the whole world to a little boy, can seem like a hell-hole to his new bride many years later. You grow up, get married to a woman who's set on helping you climb out of the dirt you come from, have a child, and then one day, a young man shows you what other desires you might have crawling under your skin. And in the end, we're on our own, together but separate, longing to understand yet never succeeding. And sometimes, guilt and blame, the self-afflicted pain is what makes us feel alive.

All in all, Witches on the Road Tonight is a well-written, complex, and multi-layered book. Holman writes well and keeps the story rolling as she builds characters bit by bit. And regarding the witches, she's caught the narrative exactly where it should be, happily trotting at the edge of the enlightened new millennium and the magical and ignorant past. ( )