Here's a first review of the highway scribe's novel, "The Sidewalk Smokers Club." You can find it at "The Espresso" or read it below. The link to buy gets you an galley copy, which has since been edited. The book comes out next month.

Tobacco Based Rebellion Core of New Novel

Fiction:
The Sidewalk Smokers Club

Fiction:
The Sidewalk Smokers Club
by Stephen Siciliano.
ASJA press. 348pp. paper. $21.95. ISBN 0-595-39581-3. Available at iUniverse.com.

Stephen Siciliano’s novel is a roller coaster ride of wild juxtapositions of fate, relationships and the importance of having a decent place to smoke. The story centers around a group of misfits drawn together by the need to share a smoke in the common banishment of an impersonal sidewalk outside (and occasionally inside) a beloved restaurant. What starts as a nodding acquaintanceship soon turns into a bond of brotherhood that progresses from mutual assistance to murder, rage against an impersonal political machine, and a merry go round of relationship dynamics. All this while engaged in an increasingly grim fight with city hall and the winning of other battles along the way.

Smokers demands a lot from its reader; the pace of the novel is dizzying for one thing, and the tone is so well conveyed that a reader swears he can hear the characters’ voices instead of reading them off a page. While the book is something one doesn’t want to put down, one often has to run back to unearth significant details that suddenly blossom into full flower in later chapters. Besides that, Siciliano has an ear for tone and accent—this brings his characters and characterizations alive to where the reader must shut the book because the characters are too loud for comfort. Like brilliance on caffeine, Smokers radiates in all directions and dimensions yet returns to its zero point as surely as the swallows return to Capistrano.

Smokers is a hopeful novel; one hopes that one can find the kind hearted people who come to one’s aid as though they’re one of the Three Musketeers, even while off on a quest worthy of Don Quixote. Smokers showcases a world that perhaps we’d all like to inhabit for awhile and be the better for it. Recommended.