In y opinion every book (and I have read almost every one he has published) by James Lee Burke has been a pleasure to read. Burke writes with the most 'delicious' prose, about deep and fascinating characters, usually int eh Southern settings he knows inside out. To be in Texas with Burke's characters here is to enjoy the feelings, weather, food, sights, sounds and scents of Houston which becomes as much a character as the young Aaron Holland Broussard as he faces some of the realities and challenges of the underside of life as a 17-year old coming of age. Each character develops with the author's meticulous care whether it's Aaron's philosophical, kindly alcoholic father, his bi-polar mother, his rogue friend Sabre, his loving girlfriend Valerie, her puzzling father or the stream of vagabond criminals. Set in the 1950s and facing a background of crime and corruption the often naive Aaron draws on strength of which he is unaware, while slowly unwinding the puzzles and detailing them as the writer he hopes to become. I highly recommend any book James Lee Burke writes as I have never been disappointed by his work.

I made it 25% into the Jealous Kind
I was unable to connect to any of the characters, making the story just not work for me as it is very character-driven as it is a coming-of-age story.

This book would probably work more for people who like westerns or books set during the 1950s.

I might come back to this book at a different point in time and love it.

On the surface this is a coming-of-age, first love story. But as with most of James Lee Burke's books, there's much, much more going on below the surface.
This one is set in Houston in 1952. Aaron, the narrator, is a rising high school senior with a difficult home life. He loves his parents, but he knows they're ..."different". When he meets Valerie Epstein,the meeting sets his life on a roller coaster of first love, mobsters, greasers, class warfare, and murder. If you've read James Lee Burke before, especially the Dave Robicheaux series, you know to expect atmosphere and introspection, and this one doesn't skimp on either. While it's technically the second in the Holland Family series, I didn't feel I'd missed anything for not having read the first one, although it's in my audiobook library and I will definitely get to it. I actually listened to much of this one, and have to give credit to Will Patton's narration - his voice is somehow perfectly suited for James Lee Burke's writing. Listen if you can.
My thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for providing a copy for an unbiased review.

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I can't recall if I've read James Lee Burke before but perhaps not. His characters are razor-sharp in their realism, his plots gripping as slides the blade.



Where to start? He won Edgar Awards for Black Cherry Blues and Cimarron Rose while Amazon readers ranked Purple Cane Road as his best. He also has two collections of stories published in literary journals like Antioch, Chariton Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and so forth. So I think I'll try those out next.



Someone at The New York Times Book Review called The Jealous Kind's examination of the 1950's “nostalgia noir.” I didn't realize it was part of a series (the Holland Family), but I didn't feel left out.



Aaron Holland Broussard gets embroiled in a fight with a rich kid, Grady Harrelson, over his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Valerie Epstein, which involves the delicious dialogue exchange:


“I thought maybe something was wrong and y’all needed help.”
“Get lost, snarf.”
“What’s a snarf?”
“Are you deaf?”
“I just want to know what a snarf is.”
“A guy who gets off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats. Now beat it.”
The music speaker went silent. My ears were popping. I could see people’s lips moving in the other cars, but I couldn’t hear any sound. Then I said, “I don’t feel like it.”
“I don’t think I heard you right.”
“It’s a free country.”
“Not for nosy frumps, it isn’t.”
“Leave him alone, Grady,” Valerie said.
“What’s a frump?” I said.
“A guy who farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles. Somebody put you up to this?”
“I was going to the restroom.”
“Then go.”

Grady's family is connected to high and low places, so this seemingly one-time bold perhaps foolish act carries long-term consequences that get worse and worse. Fortunately for him, he gets Valerie on his side (as his girl) and, less fortunately, Saber, his best buddy, who is the problematic kind of best buddy at best:

Saber was the only kid in school who how to stick porcupine quills in Krauser [the shop teacher who billed himself a WWII war hero but was a pain in the students' butts] and keep the wounds green on a daily basis. Krauser believed it was Saber who'd hung plunger through the hole in the ceiling, but he couldn't prove it and was always trying to find another reason to nail Saber to the wall. But Saber never misbehaved in metal shop, whereas other guys did and in serious fashion."

My main problem with the novel is the main character as an adult telling the tale. He seems to buy into his teenage reasoning, but the kid makes foolish choices which only makes things harder on himself. I didn't quite realize this until I was three-quarters through the book. His father had excellent advice of not even talking to these people, but Aaron does anyway. By luck, Aaron's mistakes are shown to be nothing and his enemies have done all the real damage. Writerly ingenuity would have been the better path, but the plot was rather convoluted, so maybe Burke needed to tame the multiplying threads.

It's a good enough novel, but probably not the place to begin.

James Lee Burke does a classic coming of age story set in the early fifties in Houston. How much of this is autobiographical( protagonist wants to be a writer)is uncertain-- what is certain is that it's a helluva story by one of America's premier storytellers.

I'm a HUGE fan of James Lee Burke and I adore his Dave Robicheaux series. The Jealous Kind is from the Holland Family Saga, yet is a stand-alone novel. I loved the setting, the characters and the story. Filled with young, idealistic kids and mean, cut-throat mobsters, it kept me worried and excited and afraid for the teens the entire time. While I have read reviews that called this novel somewhat darker and with no feel-good resolution, I found the end much more realistic, yet uplifting than I had expected from other reviews. I had a great time reading the book and didn't tear away from it more than necessary.

3.5★
JLB paints such great word pictures that it’s worth reading him just for that. This is a story about good guys and bad guys, many of them only about 17 years old, but it’s hardly a typical coming-of-age novel.

Our hero is Aaron Holland Broussard, remembering his youth in 1952. The locale is Houston, Texas, where teens hang out at hamburger drive-ins, get ice creams and watermelon to cool off, go fishing, and wait to finish high school.

That’s Aaron, but it’s not the kids from the other side of the tracks, so to speak. Aaron spots a 1941 Ford rumbling down the road and recognises what he calls “greasers” and describes them in a single, wonderful sentence.

“An indolent stare, slightly rounded shoulders, the shirt unbuttoned to expose the top of the chest, the collar turned up on the neck, the drapes threaded through the loops by a thin suede belt buckled below the navel, shirt cuffs buttoned even in summer, a tablespoon of grease in the sweeps of hair combed into a trench at the back of the head, iron taps on the needle-nose stomps that could be used to shatter someone’s teeth on the sidewalk the ‘pachuco’ cross tattooed on the web between the left forefinger and thumb, and more important, the total absence of pity or mercy in the eyes.”

Aaron’s best mate is beginning to go off the rails and Aaron has fallen hard for a beautiful girl. There is a long, convoluted tale about the ever-present threat of attack from angry, mob-connected villains, out to get Aaron and the good guys (in the bloodiest possible fashion), although there is considerable overlap between good and bad, so that the story got too far out of hand for me to enjoy it.

I liked the characters (when I could tell them apart) and loved the writing. The story I won’t remember.

I’ve quoted (sorry again, Simon and Schuster) from my NetGalley preview copy, but I sure hope none of it changes, because I love it!