The Swing Time Soda Emporium, by Eric L. Carlson, is a coming-of-age novel set in small-town 1940s America, following Morty Pennington-Jones and his incandescent circle of friends as they orbit the local soda shop, swing music, first love, sexual awakening, war’s aftershocks, and one impossible romance that refuses to end at the grave. At its center is Poppy Jablonsky, a sharp-tongued, unruly, unforgettable girl whose death opens the book but does not remove her from the story. What begins as nostalgia soon bends into a ghost story, murder mystery, romantic remembrance, and a meditation on how youth becomes memory.

I found the novel most alive when it let its characters talk, tease, quarrel, flirt, and philosophize in the warm clutter of the Swing Time itself. The book has a rangy, old-fashioned confidence, the kind that is willing to wander down side streets because it trusts the company is good. Morty’s voice is comic, wounded, and self-mocking, often all in the same breath, and Poppy is written with enough voltage to make her supernatural return feel less like a gimmick than a continuation of her personality. She was never going to exit politely.

What stayed with me was the book’s odd mixture of ribald comedy and genuine grief. It can be bawdy, sentimental, discursive, and surprisingly tender, sometimes within a single page. The sexual frankness won’t suit every reader, but it’s part of the book’s argument that adolescence is not cleanly separable from embarrassment, longing, curiosity, and danger. Beneath the jokes and the jukebox glow, the novel keeps circling a harder truth: the people who shape us most completely may also leave us most unfinished.

This book is best suited for adult readers who enjoy historical fiction, coming-of-age fiction, small-town fiction, ghost stories, romantic drama, nostalgia fiction, literary humor, and swing-era fiction. Readers who like the remembered-youth tenderness of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn but want it filtered through the irreverent wit of Mark Twain may find much to enjoy here. The Swing Time Soda Emporium is a bighearted, foul-mouthed, jazz-haunted valentine to youth, memory, and the stubborn afterlife of first love.

Pages: 304 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0H2FTBKC2