Hidden Place :

Rating:
Summary: Great Story & Adventure
Review: I found this book very engaging and could not put it down! Being from Chicago and about the same age of the main characters in the time period - I identified with the emotions, politics, and intellect in the story.

The characters are typical 20 somethings making the transition between a shallow teenager mindset (sex, sex, sex) and a mature adult (Otto is bad, this is wrong). I enjoyed the interplay and angst between Roman and Mila and Otto and his friend make good villains without going overboard.

My favorite part is a trip through the hills of rural Mexico where the author excellently describes this hidden oasis that propels the book into its final chapters. The sense of geography is well done here.

Rating:
Summary: Spring Break in Mexico
Review: Shawn Shiflett, in his first novel, shows his characters, Roman and Mila, college students, dashing into Escondido Bay, Mexico. They have come to this scenic paradise on their spring break, leaving behind Chicago's Arctic cold, stress of finals, and hype over the election. Set in the '70's, Bob Dylan recording, "Blood on the Tracks," "Dirty Harry," Watergate and Elton John reflect some of the culture and history of the times.
Into the small rural town, 300 kilometers south of Acapulco, come other gringos to stir up the sand; an omen comes to Roman with his first fight: Is there going to be more of this? "Am I going to end up with a switchblade tracheotomy?" One of the arriving gringos is Jay, "who comes from a long illustrious line of white trash." (...)
Shiflett treats his characters with both their dark and light sides with no falling into the tepid PC trap. They have grace as well as brutality - even Roman who hasn't had a fight since childhood.
The narration throughout Hidden Place is Roman's voice, sometimes choked with a great salty wave of emotion at injustice or the heart-seizing act of a gift from an Indian child. Roman's young innocence has been chipped by a sharp chisel in Mexico. His perception of knowledge has come through the senses; he is sadder and wiser.

Rating:
Summary: Better Than Expected
Review: Whenever I read modern, "literature," even from an author I'm at least passably familiar with, I dive in with the same wince on my face that I do when I leap off the springboard at the local pool for the first time. Will the water be too cold? Will the chlorine burn my eyes? Is there enough water in there so I won't break my neck ?

This is the kind of trepidation I approach literature with, but being an optomist, I do take the plunge again and again, and let me tell you, in the case of Hidden Place, it was worth it. Read this book. You'll find yourself recommending it to friends, as I've been doing since I finished the last page. If you don't trust the critique-ers and or the folks with their noses in the air (and their thumbs in their behinds), trust a guy who just plain knows a good story when he sees one.

Or even better, don't trust me at all. Go find a copy of Hidden Place and make your own opinion.