Description
Book SynopsisThe Whole of the Moon consists of six crisscrossing narratives set along the old Route 66, from the Inland Empire to the terminus just off Sunset Boulevard. The stories span the years from the late 1950s to the present, and the characters are bound by a fact unknown to them: they have each checked out the same public library copy of
The Great Gatsby.
An actor sits poolside waiting to hear whether he has been cast in a television pilot. Two kids ditch school in 1964 and go for a hike in the woods that turns dangerous. A woman named Dot remembers her husband who spent years working on a musical adaptation of
The Great Gatsby. A young woman Felicity deals with the consequences of an unexpected pregnancy. Mike, a former high school star, attends an open tryout for the California Angels baseball team. And a boarding school teacher tells the story of his cousin, a social climber who has disappeared in the wake of a murder. These are the characters that populate
The Whole of the Moon. Brian Rogers’ novel is about determination and failure and life in Southern California away from the red carpet.
Trade ReviewAs a fracturing of
The Great Gatsby, with its themes of careless wealth, vanity, self-delusion and self-destruction, the novel examines Los Angeles in fragments of stories that feature a wide range of characters to create a composite portrait of a place that's riven with doubt, ambition, hope: deeply American qualities that lead here, as in real life, to disappointment and loss. I kept thinking about this book and its desperate characters long after I had finished it."" - Charlotte Bacon, author of
The Twisted Thread
