Don’t Let All the Pretty Days Get By - A Review

Author: Bruce Hoppe
Publisher: Back-To-One Books
ISBN: 978-0-9777-6110-4
Pages: 216

Having decided to put the brakes on a promising career in L.A., Teddy Gibbs returns to her family’s New Mexico ranch to care for her ailing mother, but she soon discovers that her mother’s health isn’t her only concern. The book opens with a vivid scene that has a few members of the New Mexico chapter of COHAB (Clothing Optional Hot Air Ballooning) pulling an unscheduled balloon landing on her family’s horse pasture, and the balloon’s passengers emerge in the buff, to Teddy’s disdain. This awkward moment not only sets the book’s tone, it also provides us with a taste of the author’s expert hand, as he writes with a gentle, lyrical style that is both fitting and engrossing.

Things quickly come to a head, and Teddy, trying her hand at local politics, eventually challenges a proposed amendment that stands to benefit the Balloon Lollapalooza Committee—and, “If passed, the revision would tweak an obscure state law regulating hot air balloon flights. A clause would be added reducing the liability for damages resulting from balloon landings made on private property.” Teddy is also ready to act as amateur defense counsel in a pending criminal suit brought on by the nudist balloonists, which will determine the fate of the Gibbs’ two part-time ranch hands, nicknamed Song and Dance—then there is the threat of a possible civil suit that may eventually decide the fate of the family’s ranch altogether.

A lot happens in the book, and over the course of it, we, like the central character herself, are taken through the exquisite New West, with its “browning countryside” and “[t]he rolling swales of pale short-grass” that give “way to the mesa cliffs in the distance, their rusty iron-laden rock ledges carved in relief by the low-angled rays of morning sun.” We are given a tour of this vast landscape, where politicos with shady ambitions run amuck, and Indian gaming casinos take center stage. We are greeted with colorful characters, and we hear tell of others, like the scientist who had “been testing the use of electro magnetic force fields to power medical equipment at a teaching hospital when patients mysteriously began levitating above the examination table during MRI scans.” Yes, the book, on a whole, makes for a delightful and interesting reading experience.

Hoppe’s descriptions are cinematic; his dialogue, etched from life, as characters talk like real people, their speech patterns, vernaculars, and argots delivered with surprising authenticity. And though the book is slow going at the outset, Hoppe picks up the pace before long, successfully blending action, humor, political rhetoric, and unique insights. He delivers a Neo-Western with aplomb, affording his readers a ringside seat at a thrilling prize fight that pits a gaming magnate against a brave little alliance of anarchistic locals bent on exposing political subterfuge and restoring a semblance of order to their community.