Nostalgy by Miguel Vandenburgh; The Pleasure, Peculiarity, and Puzzle of the Past

 Nostalgy by Miguel Vandenburgh; The Pleasure, Peculiarity, and Puzzle of the Past

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

This review can also be found on Reedsy Discovery.

Spoilers: Nostalgia is a difficult psychological trap to fall into. It captures memories with a positive filter. It emphasizes good times and down plays sadness. It ignores that those good times weren't shared by everyone. It changes pop culture touchstones from irritating fads and sources of cringe to gold standards beyond criticism. 

Nostalgia forces people to idealize and live in the past and ignore the present in front of them. It creates a false past that has more to do with pop culture and filtered memories than reality. This trap can be found in Miguel Vandenburgh’s novel, Nostalgy.

Alejandro is a businessman who emigrated from his native Spain to Los Angeles and is on a fast track to professional success and personal misery. He hates the commute, hates this overwhelmingly loud American city, and while he is good at his job, he lacks the passion or interest in it. His thoughts often drift to old friends, past loves, and youthful adventures to the point that he can barely function at work or at home. His boss notices his depressed behavior and grants him a sabbatical. Alejandro takes the opportunity to fly back to Spain and visit his childhood home, family, old friends, and lost loves. Maybe he can find the boy that he used to be.

Nostalgy is not concerned with what it's about or who it's about but it is concerned with how it feels. Alejandro’s journey captures the mind and emotions with thoughtful evocative passages and situations that challenge the concepts of memory and reality.

In Los Angeles, Alejandro is in a constant state of stasis and inertia. Alejandro lives in the present but his mind is elsewhere. He has a good job, lives in a nice neighborhood, has friends and romantic relationships but it's all surface. He contributes to the bare minimum of his job, commute, and current friendships and relationships. Everyone else moves in the present, while he is mentally standing still in the past.

 Everyone around him moves at great speed, lives in bright colors, and loudly proclaims their emotions. Alejandro lives in a world of muted grays, silence, lumbering movements, detachment, and no emotional connection.

When Alejandro returns to Spain is when he starts recognizing color and movement. He sees the blue skies and sun’s reflections, the other commuters and travelers, and the intense euphoria that one gets when they are beginning a quest. In Alejandro's case, it's a quest to come face to face with his past.

When Alejandro returns to his Spanish hometown, he sees that it has changed. He sees more people, different buildings, companies that have franchises there that didn't exist before. He is like many whose minds are captured by the hometown of their youth and expected it to remain the same.

 They expect the landscape photographs in their mind to be unaltered but a real place isn't like a photograph. It can't and won't stay in one place forever. People move in, businesses create jobs, houses are built. The world cannot and will not remain stagnant no matter how much we want it to.

This also applies to people. Alejandro has a lovely reunion with a boyhood friend, Felix. The two walk around old haunts, live recklessly, play pranks and share intimate secrets about their past. It is like a grand adventure that is reborn decades after the last one they went on. The reunion gives Alejandro a brief moment of unbridled joy but it is only temporary.

For Alejandro the reunion with Felix is part of the goal, the answer to find out why he is stuck and whether he can find happiness. Felix however looks on it as a vacation or temporary reprieve. It's a stress reliever from his life as a single parent. He has fun then he returns. 

It doesn't have the same emotional impact for him because life didn't stop for him. Felix worked, got with someone, fathered children, and now has adult responsibilities. Alejandro has them too but life stopped in his youth. He can't mentally separate the boy that he used to be from the man that he is. It's a sad existence for him to always look forward and not back.

He also finds that sadness in other places and people as well. His father, once a proud strong man, is now weakened and made vulnerable by the natural process of age. Alejandro reunites with an old girlfriend who is pleased to see him but sets him straight by asking what he expected when coming. Did he really think that she would stay the same age and have the same personality forever? She also corrects him on many of the details reminding him that his memories are imperfect and were less how they actually were than how he wanted them to be.

Nostalgy is similar to the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance.” In it, a burned out executive (Gig Young) returns to his childhood home exactly as it was. He has traveled backwards in time and sees his younger self and his parents. When his younger self is frightened and then injured himself the man mournfully tells the boy that there won't be any cotton candy, merry go rounds, band concerts and no pleasant memories in adulthood. His father realizes that he is in the presence of his son as an adult. He tells him to go back to his old home and his real time. “There is only one summer per customer,” and to let his younger self have his. The most important crucial information that he tells him is to look around when he gets home. He might find cotton candy, merry go rounds, and band concerts. He just hasn't been looking hard enough.

When people live inside their nostalgia, they only recall the days of their youth with optimism and pleasure. They deify the music, shows, books, fashion, news, and movies of their past without really living within them. Mentally and emotionally they are frozen in that space. 

Nostalgy suggests that there is nothing wrong with those memories or those items. They made us who we are and they serve as temporary time machines. However, we can become trapped in our past and close the present and future around us. That is what Alejandro shows, someone who can't move forward because he is frozen by facing backwards. 

Living only in our youth causes us to miss the beauty and wonder around us now. A beautiful sunset. A song that speaks to us. A fictional character that says what we are thinking. A job that encourages our talent. Finding the perfect partner. The birth of a child. Our forever home and sacred space. The advances that have been made allow us to learn, live, and enjoy life on a larger scale. The voices are finally heard and listened to when they used to be forced to recede somewhere in the background. Even when things are at their hardest, there is always something to learn, enjoy, take pride in, experience, and love.

You can't go home to the past again but you can experience the world around you and find your own cotton candy, merry go rounds, and band concerts. It takes some time but Alejandro finds his.

New Book Alert: A Kite at The Edge of The World by Katy Grant; Moving, Beautiful, and Lyrical Juvenile Book About Youth, Death, and Summer Days That Never End

New Book Alert: A Kite at The Edge of The World by Katy Grant; Moving, Beautiful, and Lyrical Juvenile Book About Youth, Death, and Summer Days That Never End

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews



PopSugar Reading Challenge: A bildungsroman




Spoilers: We all remember when we were kids. The best friends that we made just by being at the right place at the right time, on the swing set at the playground, in line on the first day at school, or sitting next to you in class. We remember the summer days that seemed to never end. When life was all about the next game, the next imaginative adventure, the next trip to the movies or the library, or the next ice cream cone or frozen popsicle. The sun seemed brighter, the sky seemed bluer, and the days always seemed better. Nothing could bother us and we could live forever.


That magic is captured in A Kite at the Edge of the World, Katy Grant's beautiful and lyrical juvenile novel about those days. It's a simple story about two young boys meeting during a summer vacation and spending their days having fun, going to the beach, and flying kites. Children, about ages 8-12 will love the kids and their friendship and adventures and how they use their imagination to have fun and get out of trouble (As a bonus, the book includes instructions, so children will learn how to make a kite.)

But there is a sad wistfulness throughout the writing that adults will understand. Similar to another children's book that I reviewed, The Voyage of Gethsarade by M.G. Claybrook, this could almost be considered a children's book with an adult audience in mind. However, unlike Gethsarade which is an edgy satire of heroification, what will appeal to the adults in this book is the longing nostalgia of those days. The desire of the narrator to relive those days and bottle them up now that he is older and weighed down with maturity. The children reading the book haven't yet reached that longing (one hopes) but the adults reading it to them have.


The unnamed Narrator is an old man who is nearing the end of his life and thinks back to the best day of his life. It happened when he was a boy and on holiday with his parents. Grant's lyrical description gives her writing an almost poetic feel, as though describing an Impressionist seascape painting. As an old man, The Narrator recalls the sights and sounds of that beach: "Rows of little wooden cottages painted white with roofs with red shingles. A great many wooden boardwalks. The lovely thumping sound they made under bare feet-despite the very real danger of splinters. Along the boardwalks, decks with wooden chairs, also white. Tables shaded by blue striped umbrellas. An occasional gazebo.

But mostly sea, and sky, and sand. The turquoise sea, the azure sky, the buff sand. The salty taste of the breeze. And the smell of fish, not unpleasant in the sea air. Dots of white on the ocean where the waves peaked. The sky-a blue suffused with sunlight-expansive, endless. Sands glittering white at noon, tawny at sunset, shapeshifting. Sea and sky and sand all meeting at the confluence of that little white seaside village."


While playing on the seashore, The Narrator makes a new friend Ilio. Ilio is brave, adventurous….and dying. Ilio is very ill and it is clear that his illness is taking its toll on his body, but he is determined to make the most of the little time that he has and that includes receiving a new best friend.


The first item on the friendship itinerary is to fly a kite. The Narrator has a book that gives detailed instructions on how to make a kite, unfortunately they don't have the money to purchase some of the things that are needed. No matter, the ever resourceful Ilio says, we'll find some. So the Dynamic Duo go through the seaside town looking for loose change under the boardwalk, inside the Penny Arcade, and a water fountain. (They make sure that when they take the coins from the fountain, they make a wish that the person's wish will come true so they don't deprive anyone of a wish.) During their journey to get money and to buy supplies, Ilio shows off a feisty charming nature. He is feisty when he is ready to fight a bully for their money and charming when he shares details of their adventures to sympathetic adults. His exuberant mental state belies his physical weakened body, which is revealed whenever he has to stop for a breather.


When the two finally get their kite in the air, it is a sight to behold, a splash of various colors in the blue sky. The moment enchants the adults on the beach as they watch the kite dance along the air. The boys imagine what it would be like to let it go and allow it to fly forever into the sky. The boy's musings contemplate the existence of many things. The Narrator wonders: "If all the words that had ever been spoken by all the people who had ever lived were floating around the Earth above us. If that was true, was there some way to hear them? Like the way Ilio imagined others might see our kite? Once a thing like a kite or a word was gone from you, was that the end of it? Or was it a part of you forever?

.....I felt like the kite was a part of me, and it was there, but here I was, far below it, standing on the beach. Only this string from the general store kept us together.

And yet-how could that be? Was I the kite? Was the kite me? And what about Ilio? Was he the kite, too? We're he and I connected forever?"

These words suggest the transience of things how objects like kites as well as people don't last forever. Like that beautiful kite in the air or words like "I love you" or "You are my best friend" can disappear and float along. Eventually, they disappear. Objects get destroyed. Words are said and forgotten. Bodies die. But our memories are what last. Those things are still there as long as we are there to think about them and remember how they made us feel.

The kite flying ends what The Narrator describes as the best day of his life. His friendship continues even as Ilio's health gets progressively worse. The two still spend time together, building a sand castle that they know won't last and swimming just so Ilio can exert himself. (In his cheeky way, when an observer points out Ilio could have drowned, he answers "But I didn't.")

A particularly touching moment occurs when The Narrator tells a bed-ridden Ilio a story from his own imagination. With Ilio's prodding, The Narrator tells his friend a story about a boy's adventure at sea. Through his words, he gives his best friend an adventure that he can experience in his imagination, if not in reality. (The Narrator's recall of every detail of this story suggests that he too never got to have his adventures either, but his gift for imagination continued into old age and remains a soothing balm through an adult life of responsibility, stability, sameness, and tedium.)


A Kite at the Edge of the World is a true tear jerker and even the hardest of hearts will sniffle a little by the end. The Narrator realizes that even though Ilio did not live long, he left an impact on his life that allowed him to examine love and life and to be grateful for those moments even if they last only for a little while.

Weekly Reader: The Rome of Fall by Chad Alan Gibbs; Biting Novel About Small Town Life, School Days, '90's Nostalgia, and Memories Good and Bad

Weekly Reader: The Rome of Fall by Chad Alan Gibbs; Biting Novel About Small Town Life, School Days, '90's Nostalgia, and Memories Good and Bad

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book that features social media 

Spoilers: This is a book that fills me with so many memories, that it almost scares me. I went to a rural high school and graduated in the '90's (Grandview R-II, Ware, Missouri, Class of '96.) So I remember so much of it, the Friday night football games especially Homecoming, the pre-social media age of card catalogs, AOL, and chat rooms, X Files on Friday then Sunday nights, and Alternative and Grunge music from the greats like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Garbage, Sound Garden, Alice in Chains, Jane's Addiction, and many others. Chad Alan Gibbs' The Rome of Fall reopens those days so well, that he makes me wonder if he had a camera installed at my high school at the time, just so he could take notes for a future novel. (Or more than likely remembered his own high school years, which is the more logical theory.)

Marcus Brinks is a new kid at Rome High School in Rome, Alabama in 1994. He loves Alternative music and wants to front his own band but right now he's an outcast new kid who is bullied, particularly by quarterback, Deacon Cassburn. He goes through the typical teen hijinks such as making friends with fellow outcast, Jackson Crowder with whom he shares a mutual love of Weezer and his crush on pretty girl, Becca Walsh.

Rome is a school that takes its football team seriously. Very seriously. Pep rallies are scheduled every Friday afternoon and the football games are packed every night. The students go to the games and meet for pizza afterwards. It's a time honored tradition that everyone partakes. Even those with no athletic abilities or interest, like Marcus, engage in the social activities of attending the games and get caught up in the whole "us vs. them" mentality. Why Marcus even has a Friday Night Girlfriend in Becca. (Her real boyfriend is Deacon, but since he plays football, she needs someone to accompany her to games or take her out when he goes to the away games.)

If you didn't live in a rural school, or any school which was practically dependant on its athletic teams, and weren't interested in sports and had other options on Fridays, then you probably don't understand what football season is like in high school. The Rome of Fall is not exaggerating. If anything, it understates how big it is to some schools.

 It's easy to get excited during those Fridays during the pep rallies when cheerleaders lead spectators in cheering on the team as well as your class (Seniors usually got the biggest cheers). Even the most non-athletic students (such as this one who was a shy socially awkward bookworm with very few friends) could get swept up in the excitement and belonging. It didn't matter if the team won or lost. (My years, they got as far as district my freshman year then suffered a tremendous losing streak afterwards.) You were there in your school colors (ours were black and gold), created posters and mascot designs for spirit week (Grandview Eagles), and used those days as a time to socialize, have fun, and act as a unit. In rural schools with little options of alternate things to do on a Friday night, football games could often be the highlight of the week. Gibbs conveys that milieu rather well.

After graduating high school, Marcus becomes the lead singer of an indie rock band, Dear Brutus. They manage to release one album called The Beige Album, reportedly inspired by Markus' relationship with an ex-girlfriend and Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal novel, The Giver (more '90's Nostalgia. Who didn't read that in school or repeatedly see it advertised in book order forms or Scholastic Book Fairs?) The Beige Album sold 500,000 copies, certified gold, and received unanimous praise from critics. The group received instantaneous success until Marcus walked off stage during a concert in 1999 and the group disbanded. Marcus then spent some time in the Caribbean in isolation and solitude.

While the musical trajectory of Dear Brutus is traditional, almost cliched with the instant success, internal problems, and break up, it adds to the nostalgia for those of us who remember the music of the 1990's. Songs as varied as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Pearl Jam's "Even Flow," Sound Garden's  "Black Hole Sun," Alice in Chain's "Man in the Box," Lisa Loeb's "Stay (I Missed You)", Melissa Etheridge's "Come To My Window," Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Souls?", Sheryl Crow's "All I Want To Do," Tom Cochrane's "Life is a Highway," Blind Melon's "No Rain," Faith No More's "Epic," Green Day's "Basket Case",  and Smashing Pumpkins' "Vampire" and many many others were the soundtracks of many of our teen years. Chances are if the music was stripped down, the vocals were either mournful and melancholy or screaming and angry, the lyrics brutally honest, and the performers were upfront about their personal problems and sneered at corporate commercialism while at the same time welcomed it, then by all the Gods and Goddesses, it was our music. 

That's how Gibbs writes Dear Brutus, a sometimes satirical but an affectionate tribute to the music of the 1990's. The Readers nod in recognition comparing the fictional Dear Brutus with many of their own favorite real life favorite groups and singers.

The Rome of Fall alternates between Marcus' past as a high school student and as a rock musician and his present as he returns to 2017 Rome. Unemployed, caring for his ailing mother, and almost 20 years removed from his rock star fame, he accepts a position as an English teacher at Rome High School. While some believe that you can't go home again, that doesn't really apply when those you knew never left.

His old rival Deacon is part of the Quarterback Club. His former girlfriend, Becca Walsh teaches sixth grade. The biggest change is in his former best friend, Jackson. Once a fellow rock fan and social misfit, Jackson is a coach, town hero, and practically owns Rome. He has also transforned into a complete jerk who hides a sleazy, cheating, illegal nature underneath a "God-and-Country-Family-Values" community leader image.

 Those who would find it unrealistic that so many of Marcus' old high school acquaintances still live in town should check their former classmates' social media accounts and realize that true to life, many of them do stick around where they grew up and went to school.

Returning to Rome forces Marcus to confront his past. He can't hide from his former rock fame when his students have access to Wikipedia, Spotify, and other social media apps and waste plenty of class time reminding him of it. He also can't hide from terrible things that he did in high school, one that changed the trajectory of his, Deacon's, and Jackson's lives forever. 

He also has to confront the reality of his relationships with those he knew and wonder if he really knew them at all. Was Becca the sweet lost muse of his imagination and lyrics or was she just using Marcus and is continuing to use him? Did Jackson change and get a swelled head over the years or was he always a jerk and Marcus just didn't notice? Marcus' past is colored through rose tinted reminisces about the good old days, until they bleeds over into the present and he has to see them as they really were.

 In the present  Marcus finds himself caught between his former friend and rival, discovering that some resentments haven't changed and some emotions have only gotten stronger as he and those around him have gotten older. Once he faces the lives of those in the present, is he able to confront his past and come forward about things that he did and in which he turned a blind eye.

The Rome of Fall is the type of book that on the surface brims with nostalgia. However, it also forces us to look at those old days with a more critical eye, what really happened, how we behaved, and the troubles we faced. We will see that we did horrible things, that times were hard, that life wasn't perfect. We may still like the music, or watch the movies. We may even still go to the local football games, but that doesn't mean that life was better or more perfect. Only our memories distorted them to make them seem better than they were. Adults look at their youths as carefree and wonderful when they weren't. People in the 2020's look on past decades with fondness and longing that no one would have had at the time. (Though considering how stressful 2020 already is, who can blame them?) 

The Rome of Fall is a biting commentary that shows that nostalgia is simply a trick of the memory. There were no good old days, just days.