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Coyote Moon
You may think Field of Dreams meets Cocoon, or perhaps, The Natural meets Love Story, some may even say that it's Ball Four clashing with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.
But, John Miller's Coyote Moon is all of these and more. In a gone-to-seed trailer park on the edge of the Mojave Desert, quantum physics runs headlong into reincarnation as the park's highly eccentric residents sit around in the evenings drinking home-brewed beer and asking Can a young, previously unheard-of rookie baseball player be the latest in a line of reincarnated spirits leading back to Sir Isaac Newton?
And in the clubhouse of the Oakland Athletics, the mysterious athlete in question, Henry Spencer, a young North Carolinian with nothing more than a high school education and a fuzzy memory, tries to reconcile, among other arcane topics, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle with the somewhat less intellectual world of baseball.
Coyote Moon, John Miller's eagerly awaited fourth novel, will have you laughing with delight and wondering to the very end just who the young Henry Spencer really is, and what exactly, links him to the most unusual trailer park in Needles, California.
But, John Miller's Coyote Moon is all of these and more. In a gone-to-seed trailer park on the edge of the Mojave Desert, quantum physics runs headlong into reincarnation as the park's highly eccentric residents sit around in the evenings drinking home-brewed beer and asking Can a young, previously unheard-of rookie baseball player be the latest in a line of reincarnated spirits leading back to Sir Isaac Newton?
And in the clubhouse of the Oakland Athletics, the mysterious athlete in question, Henry Spencer, a young North Carolinian with nothing more than a high school education and a fuzzy memory, tries to reconcile, among other arcane topics, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle with the somewhat less intellectual world of baseball.
Coyote Moon, John Miller's eagerly awaited fourth novel, will have you laughing with delight and wondering to the very end just who the young Henry Spencer really is, and what exactly, links him to the most unusual trailer park in Needles, California.
304 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
John A. Miller
21 books6 followers My art career began on something of a down note when I was informed by a 5th grade art teacher that, in her considered opinion, I couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler (this was back in the day before the concept of self-esteem had blossomed like a flower—or a weed, depending upon your point of view—in the barren fields of primary school pedagogy). Many years were to pass before I realized that art consists of very few straight lines. Thus liberated I threw away my extensive collection of rulers and embarked on a voyage of artistic discovery that continues to this day.
The development of my writing career followed a somewhat different path. After a rather varied business career (a few hits, a few runs, a few errors) I decided, pretty much out of the blue, to become a writer. When confronted with the dismay of trusted associates (most of whom were reasonably certain that I had lost my mind) I took comfort in the knowledge that even if I still couldn't draw straight lines I had always been able to write a reasonably coherent sentence (a heartfelt thank you here to all my junior and high school English teachers who accepted no excuses when it came to learning the basic rules of grammar). What I knew about the craft of creative writing could have easily fit in a very small box, but I optimistically (some said foolishly) persevered, and, to some degree serendipitously, one good thing led to another. My first collection of short stories, Jackson Street and Other Soldier Stories won the California Book Award for First Fiction, and is now available as an eBook download at Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), and Barnes & Noble (Nook). My first two mystery/suspense novels, Cutdown and Causes of Action, were published by Pocket Books. My third and fourth novels, Tropical Heat and Coyote Moon were published by Forge (Tropical Heat is now available as a Kindle download from Amazon). My newest novel, The Power of Stones, has just been published as an eBook and is now available for download at Amazon. My short fiction has appeared in, among others, The William & Mary Review, Crosscurrents, The Missouri Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
The cat's name, by the way, is Della, after Della Street, who was introduced in Erle Stanley Gardner's first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933.
The development of my writing career followed a somewhat different path. After a rather varied business career (a few hits, a few runs, a few errors) I decided, pretty much out of the blue, to become a writer. When confronted with the dismay of trusted associates (most of whom were reasonably certain that I had lost my mind) I took comfort in the knowledge that even if I still couldn't draw straight lines I had always been able to write a reasonably coherent sentence (a heartfelt thank you here to all my junior and high school English teachers who accepted no excuses when it came to learning the basic rules of grammar). What I knew about the craft of creative writing could have easily fit in a very small box, but I optimistically (some said foolishly) persevered, and, to some degree serendipitously, one good thing led to another. My first collection of short stories, Jackson Street and Other Soldier Stories won the California Book Award for First Fiction, and is now available as an eBook download at Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), and Barnes & Noble (Nook). My first two mystery/suspense novels, Cutdown and Causes of Action, were published by Pocket Books. My third and fourth novels, Tropical Heat and Coyote Moon were published by Forge (Tropical Heat is now available as a Kindle download from Amazon). My newest novel, The Power of Stones, has just been published as an eBook and is now available for download at Amazon. My short fiction has appeared in, among others, The William & Mary Review, Crosscurrents, The Missouri Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
The cat's name, by the way, is Della, after Della Street, who was introduced in Erle Stanley Gardner's first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 24, 2021
Uneven, but wonderful sense of place and whimsically compelling. Have tried other books by this author but this is the only one that worked for me.
January 9, 2012
The writing style is intriguing, even compelling, as is the subject matter, at first: handled with such skill that the reader hardly notices how much "telling" instead of "showing" is going on, with the introduction of the sizeable cast. From the first few chapters, we know that the two sets of characters are fated to meet, and we can't wait for it to happen...
...however, along the way, things get weird. Couples come together without effort, and the author feels no need to show us the intricacies of how this happens. Yes, I GET that it's not a romance novel, but still, it wouldn't kill him to have given us a little more than a single paragraph where we're told that they travel together and then have sex on a table and suddenly they're a couple, or a waitress sees an athlete and informs them they're going on a date and suddenly they're a couple.
Henry's adventures in the world of pro ball are, ultimately, pointless because nothing ever really comes of his being swindled on his contract, there's no focal point or conflict there because Henry himself is as impassive as a cigar-store Indian. If the point of his travails on the baseball team were to meet the fellow player that ended up living in the trailer park with the rest of them, this plotline could have been written FAR more tightly, precisely, and purposefully. As it is, Henry's entire plotline meanders until the reader is bewildered about what in the hell the point was to it all.
That leads me to Henry himself. I'm convinced that he is either a high-functioning autistic, or has Asperger's syndrome. I'm also confused as to how he keeps mentioning how he doesn't know where he came from, or what he was doing before being discovered for baseball, when it becomes perfectly clear that he DOES indeed know. Is he lying? Missing parts of his memory? Going insane? Am *I* going insane? It's so confusing.
His relationship with his new girlfriend is seamless perfection, with them concurring in every possible way, no matter what happens: living in a house with no furniture? Sure! Pregnant? Yay! Deserting his baseball career to head out to live in a trailer in the desert after reading a letter from an elderly German man? Why not! There's never any conflict or even a moment's dissent between them, thus creating a very unrealistic, unsatisfying relationship that cloys.
The same goes for Benny and Becky. I personally have trouble warming up to a woman who's so irresponsible with her birth control that she has three unplanned pregnancies in as many years. I also find her and Benny's delight in her last pregnancy puzzling and unrealistic, but that could be because their relationship is so poorly composed and exposed to us: they, too, have an idyllic dynamic with nary a disagreement or hiccup in how attuned their priorities are to each other. Again, the lack of conflict produces an unnatural, shallow pairing. A far better-developed, infinitely more touching depiction of love is that of the Schmidtbauers, and even Al's newfound love with the widowed proprietor of the trailer park has more "meat" and genuine sentiment and depth than the other two.
Most poorly done of all is how the two plotlines, always precariously connected at best, finally come together. I suppose the point of it all was that appearances can be deceiving, especially when you hope for something to be true so hard you delude yourself (as in the case of Gunter's insistence that Henry is Arthur's reincarnation). But the red herrings that are suggested so strongly, and then later on dismissed so perfunctorily, just leave the reader confused and baffled.
PS. the most ridiculous, unlikely aspect is how Benny and Henry both expound on arcane mathematic and scientific issues and, instead of those around them being bored and loathing them as show-offs (which is how most Americans are with exposure to advanced educational issues), they are greeted with exclamations of delight. Hello, wake up and smell the anti-intellectualism. If this happened in the real world, no one would engage in mutually rapturous expressions of joy and try to wrap their own brains around the issues brought forth by the eggheads. And I say this AS an egghead who's received this selfsame reaction myself, many times.
Thus the author's tenuous grasp on characterization causes him to create a cast that do not feel genuine or authentic; instead, they feel like ethereal dream-people who lack passion, reason, or sanity. They float through the plot instead of impacting it or the reader, and thus they are quite unsatisfying, insubstantial, and disappointing.
...however, along the way, things get weird. Couples come together without effort, and the author feels no need to show us the intricacies of how this happens. Yes, I GET that it's not a romance novel, but still, it wouldn't kill him to have given us a little more than a single paragraph where we're told that they travel together and then have sex on a table and suddenly they're a couple, or a waitress sees an athlete and informs them they're going on a date and suddenly they're a couple.
Henry's adventures in the world of pro ball are, ultimately, pointless because nothing ever really comes of his being swindled on his contract, there's no focal point or conflict there because Henry himself is as impassive as a cigar-store Indian. If the point of his travails on the baseball team were to meet the fellow player that ended up living in the trailer park with the rest of them, this plotline could have been written FAR more tightly, precisely, and purposefully. As it is, Henry's entire plotline meanders until the reader is bewildered about what in the hell the point was to it all.
That leads me to Henry himself. I'm convinced that he is either a high-functioning autistic, or has Asperger's syndrome. I'm also confused as to how he keeps mentioning how he doesn't know where he came from, or what he was doing before being discovered for baseball, when it becomes perfectly clear that he DOES indeed know. Is he lying? Missing parts of his memory? Going insane? Am *I* going insane? It's so confusing.
His relationship with his new girlfriend is seamless perfection, with them concurring in every possible way, no matter what happens: living in a house with no furniture? Sure! Pregnant? Yay! Deserting his baseball career to head out to live in a trailer in the desert after reading a letter from an elderly German man? Why not! There's never any conflict or even a moment's dissent between them, thus creating a very unrealistic, unsatisfying relationship that cloys.
The same goes for Benny and Becky. I personally have trouble warming up to a woman who's so irresponsible with her birth control that she has three unplanned pregnancies in as many years. I also find her and Benny's delight in her last pregnancy puzzling and unrealistic, but that could be because their relationship is so poorly composed and exposed to us: they, too, have an idyllic dynamic with nary a disagreement or hiccup in how attuned their priorities are to each other. Again, the lack of conflict produces an unnatural, shallow pairing. A far better-developed, infinitely more touching depiction of love is that of the Schmidtbauers, and even Al's newfound love with the widowed proprietor of the trailer park has more "meat" and genuine sentiment and depth than the other two.
Most poorly done of all is how the two plotlines, always precariously connected at best, finally come together. I suppose the point of it all was that appearances can be deceiving, especially when you hope for something to be true so hard you delude yourself (as in the case of Gunter's insistence that Henry is Arthur's reincarnation). But the red herrings that are suggested so strongly, and then later on dismissed so perfunctorily, just leave the reader confused and baffled.
PS. the most ridiculous, unlikely aspect is how Benny and Henry both expound on arcane mathematic and scientific issues and, instead of those around them being bored and loathing them as show-offs (which is how most Americans are with exposure to advanced educational issues), they are greeted with exclamations of delight. Hello, wake up and smell the anti-intellectualism. If this happened in the real world, no one would engage in mutually rapturous expressions of joy and try to wrap their own brains around the issues brought forth by the eggheads. And I say this AS an egghead who's received this selfsame reaction myself, many times.
Thus the author's tenuous grasp on characterization causes him to create a cast that do not feel genuine or authentic; instead, they feel like ethereal dream-people who lack passion, reason, or sanity. They float through the plot instead of impacting it or the reader, and thus they are quite unsatisfying, insubstantial, and disappointing.
May 25, 2014
COYOTE MOON by John A. Miller is an ambitious book that doesn't quite realize its goals. A superb baseball player who might be a re-incarnated mathematician shows up at the Oakland A's spring training compound. The player, Henry Spencer, is a prodigious catcher and hitter who accomplishes feats in the field and at bat that defy logic. Yet Henry seems to be indifferent to the National Pasttime, almost biding his time. Meanwhile in a small trailer park in the Mojave Desert, a group of intellectual eccentrics await a singularity. The residents spend their time making love, eating fantastic food which one of the women grows in her garden, drinking beer, being innovative and waxing philosophically about science, reincarnation and politics, a somewhat leftist version of Ayn Rand's 70-page sociopathic rants. At some point, Henry appears to abandon baseball in order to join the Mojave Desert eccentrics. The conclusion seems to be that incompatible dualities co-exist. Although the attempt to blend baseball and philosophical science held promise, the reader too often thinks too much story energy was expended for results, which, although not meager, seemed more like a bloop double than a tape-measure home run.
August 6, 2009
I'm not sure how good a book this is--some of the writing was a little awkward & it was occasionally a little heavy-handedly didactic--but it sure did amuse me. We start out getting to know a couple of MIT physicists, one about 60 & one about 40. When the younger one dies, the older one ditches his old life, drives across the country & settles in an Airstream trailer (along with a young woman he picks up along the way) in the Mojave Desert with a small group of eccentrics. Meanwhile, in a parallel story, a young, unknown, but exceptionally gifted baseball player shows up at the Oakland As spring training camp. In addition to exceptional talent as a ball player, he exhibits surprising (apparently even to himself) intellectual, especially mathematical, gifts, and little is known of his past. This story would seem to be a cliched one, but it feels fresh as told here. It's ironic that after reading several books whose characteristics should have appealed to me but ended up disappointing, this one has characteristics that normally put me off, but was very appealing.
July 8, 2013
Do you think I was influenced in my rating since I have owned an Airstream trailer for decades? Do you think I was influenced in my rating and review because I like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? Do you think I was influenced since I recently read histories of California and Arizona and I appreciated the historical accuracy wrapped into the histories on some of the characters? Do you think I was influenced by prior travels through Needles and amazement at how the author made the setting appealing? As for baseball, I know little about it, can't play it well, but still enjoy a good tale with baseball as the setting.
However, don't take my word for anything, as if there is any likelihood of that happening.
Enjoy the book! Really ! Enjoy it more if you read it on an Airstream.
However, don't take my word for anything, as if there is any likelihood of that happening.
Enjoy the book! Really ! Enjoy it more if you read it on an Airstream.
February 21, 2009
suffers from a problem I've seen in too many baseball novels: the sense that the writer is writing about the wrong decade of baseball, with the wrong sort of players, with names that do not exactly go with a set of men that would be playing major league baseball in 1996 or later....
that and what comes off as general unrealism in the baseball scenes. I realize a lot of baseball novels are not exactly mimetic fiction, but it's hard, so hard, to get the tone right, and what should be humorous exaggeration falls flat.
that and what comes off as general unrealism in the baseball scenes. I realize a lot of baseball novels are not exactly mimetic fiction, but it's hard, so hard, to get the tone right, and what should be humorous exaggeration falls flat.
October 6, 2011
Not something that I would have picked out for myself, but my husband gave it to me for Christmas, no doubt because of the subtitle ("A Novel of Love, Baseball, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle"). I enjoyed it. An eccentric group of trailer park residents in Death Valley, including a brilliant mathematician/physicist who has walked away from his wife and career, and a rookie baseball player with an instictual understanding of physics that allows him to catch and hit anything. Funny and well-imagined.
April 16, 2013
I read for pure enjoyment and Coyote Moon kept me entertained cover to cover. It resides on my bedside table permanently. I never tire of how Miller draws the reader into each situation and character. What middle aged guy can't relate to Benny's profound intellect. The whole Needles crew are so enchanting. Add in an eccentric/simple athletic freak who shakes up the embedded foundation of the baseball world and it just gets better! Who doesn't dream of a simple life filled with amazing interesting friends. Coyote Moon gives you that and so much more!
February 1, 2016
I'm not going to claim that this is the best writing in the world. The story is sort of loose and has multiple threads that don't really come together... BUT - I love this book. Miller does a good job of creating the scenes and bringing the characters to life. But then, I'm a desert lover - and a baseball lover.
January 20, 2008
I like this author and will read more of his work. This book is a great read if you are a Red Sox fan, if you are a physicist, if you wonder about reincarnation, if you love the desert or if you like baseball at all. Very cool and unexpected.
July 22, 2013
The book has an interesting plot line and compelling characters. I was a fun read but not real exceptional. Definitely different and also funny in places.It has some great put downs of the baseball pathos. Good job, John Miller. When are we going to see more more books?
January 8, 2015
This book started out with a great promise of supernatural phenomena influencing peoples' lives, but that was not satisfied by the end. Pleasant read, but ultimately left me wanting more than it gave.
August 10, 2016
A quirky, interesting, unpredictable novel. It was quite unlike the novels I usually read, which I should have figured out by the novel's subtitle "A Novel of Love, Baseball, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle". I really enjoyed it!
November 20, 2008
Reading this almost good book about physics, mystisism and baseball is making me apreciate the genius of WP Kinsella. If you like basseball and magic go straight to Kinsella and skip this one.
May 20, 2010
Strange, funny, sad, smart and sexy. What more can I say... .
June 25, 2012
oh my goodness no
January 2, 2013
Totally not what I was expecting story wise. Felt inclined to finish it in case it got better towards the end, which it did not. Too many loose ends and stories that were not connecting.
January 28, 2010
Fun read. About lost fantasies.
May 23, 2013
Though the premise seems weird, physics and baseball, they work wonderfully together.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews