What happens when a pharmaceutically challenged harp player has a midlife crisis as she lurches into menopause, and enters the Afterlife by mistake?
Solange Duvall is a menopausal, new-age, pharmaceutically-challenged harp player who reads Tarot cards on a 900-line, keeps a dream journal, and lives with her toothless diabetic cat named Freida May.
A member of the Boomer Generation, she had dreamed, as a 1970s flower child, of love, peace, and pumping Light into people's DNA through her harp playing.
Now in later life, she realizes she needs a more focused plan. This is the story of how Solange lets go of her tequila shots and tries again to live her dream.
Actually, she doesn't totally let go of the tequila shots, and after being fired from her gig playing in a prestigious all-harp orchestra, Solange enters the Afterlife by mistake. There she learns the key to her survival.
Excerpt
ACT I
SOLANGE IN BED
Scene 1: Night Sweats
Solange sat in bed wearing her granddaughter’s pink boa and writing in her journal with a Hello Kitty magic wand pen. A shot of tequila sat on her nightstand. She was done being blond. Brown dye applied to her ash blond hair earlier that day had turned it a pale lavender. That was fine. She was just glad the blond was gone. It had been exhausting.
As her small body sank into the luscious tropical mist of an impending hot flash, she put the pen to her chin and waited. The familiar warmth hit her in the solar plexus like a small internal bomb, and the heat radiated out so evenly and quickly it made her gasp. Sweat broke out on her forehead, her chest, her thighs. Within seconds her Victoria’s Secret peach satin nightgown was soaked through. She leaned back on her seven extra-soft pillows and let the changing of her life wash through her.
The fever was fabulous. It was legitimate. No one could deprive her of it, it was a documented scientific event. It was part of who she was. She was hot.
Dripping with sweat, she absentmindedly reached for a cigarette, then remembered she had given them up thirty-five years ago.
She wrote in her dream journal.
The doctors plan to stick long, thin needles into my brain. It is experimental. There is nothing I can do to stop them. They stand around me, talking about how they are going to insert the needles. I sit there like an idiot, just waiting. The surgery would be very delicate, rare, intrusive. I feel horror but can think of no way out.
Solange closed her eyes for a few minutes as she came out of the mid-life fever and began to freeze. She took a dainty sip of the Cuervo Gold, leaving a layer of light peach lipgloss on the jigger. Re-energized, she wrote:
If I have this dream one more time I’m going to go nuts.
Indeed, she had looked up each of the dream symbols in Wilda Tanner’s The Mystical Magical Marvelous World of Dreams, but Wilda just didn’t go where Solange went at night.
On a whim, Solange tripped into the bathroom and dyed her lavender hair brown. It came out dark burgundy. The whole point of all this hair stuff was to figure out a way that the gray hair coming in wouldn’t look so startling. She did not like to be startled. She was done being startled, which was why she had the ringers on the phones in her townhouse turned off. She figured she’d know someone was calling by just getting that energy, which was as startled as she could tolerate just now -- or she’d simply miss the call and find it later on her machine. She had no great need to talk to anyone on the phone about anything. Except, of course, her Tarot card callers, but the 900-line was separate, and only rang after she logged in.
Once some doctor gave her a pill so she wouldn’t jump ten feet into the air every time the phone rang. Although the pill was nice, it was not worth the possible liver damage -- Solange wanted to hoard her liver points for stuff that actually mattered, like her tequila shots -- so she came up with the radical idea of not having any phone ringers on. She loved being old; there were so many more solutions to things.
I keep thinking -- if only I had a man who loved me who I loved...then I could dump all my anxieties and nightmares on him. But then he’d probably want sex in return.
That was the exact moment that Carlo rang the doorbell.
(c) Suzann Kale
Professional Reviews
Descent Into Madness - Review by Lloyd Lofthouse
Solange Duval, the fifty-two year old main character in Midnight Tequila, is a woman who enjoys her hot flashes, her booze, and her drugs but misses her husband Paul-Michel, who died from cancer years earlier.
Although it is never clear where the money comes from that supports her almost plush lifestyle, she does earn cash as a 900-line telephone Tarot Card reading fortuneteller. I suspect Paul-Michel may have had money or an insurance policy but that is never mentioned.
Solange also dreams of success playing the harp and when it finally looks like she's made it in Rio, she sabotages the chance by a few flawed notes and returns to Texas.
Throughout the novel, Solange often remembers moments with Paul-Michel. To me, it was obvious her depression and need for booze and drugs was to stay numb. He may have been the only person who understood her.
Even having regular sex with kinky Carlo, who tries hot-wax sex, seems to be an attempt to forget. In fact, Solange doesn't seem to have much to enjoy from life.
For a companion, Solange has Bunny May, a wise, toothless diabetic cat, who shouldn't be drinking milk but does.
The story is nicely balanced between the 900 calls and Solange's "trips" through life with her equally strange friends. Solange is not a stereotypical character. She is a uniquely challenged individual and an almost lost soul and that is what makes this story worth reading.
At times, Solange comes off as a sexy ditzy airhead, who even in her 50s turns heads with her cute figure. She writes in a dream journal of dark places that reminded me of someone suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). There are hints that she may have been sexually abused earlier in life and Paul-Michel rescued her, the only man she probably ever loved, and losing him solidified her PTSD.
This novel, which meanders through the head of someone who has almost lost herself to darkness, was an intriguing character study and it isn't a nice place to be if you are Solange, but it is worth the read if you are someone who enjoys stories that do not follow a formula genre outline. I enjoyed reading Midnight Tequila and recommend it.
Funny and Disturbing - Review by Emilie A. Cartouon
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2010
An absorbing read that hints at deep, dark places without explicitly naming them. Its heroine is intelligent and sexy and maybe in her 50's or more - I love that she's not a teenager. She is asking some of the questions that first occurred to us as adolescents, and they look good on her. Women 35 and up will love this book, and maybe younger women too.
Did you ever start a book which is so alien, so bizarre from anything that has occurred in your life, so far, and you think this is not my type of book, but you just keep on reading, thinking, ah...what is the point of this book? But then words "the lure of Funky Music" heads a page and you decide to keep on reading, knowing that you now realize just why, many years ago, you decided that you would never want to take pills or drink something to the extent that you would not want to know what had happened--and this book proved that you had made the right decision! But you figure, by now, there has to be more to this book, so you just keep on reading...
Seriously, if you read the subtitle of a book and it says: The Midlife Crisis of a Quirky Pharmaceutically-Challenged Harp Player, and the only words that caught your attention was "harp player," then beware, because you have no idea exactly what a midlife crisis really is! And you might be grateful that you never learn! Especially since your mid-life is in the past... But, darn, Harp Music!
I think of some songs that I'd like to hear on the Harp: Whispering Hope Or The Lord's Prayer--Ah, beautiful, so you decide to keep on reading about her wild, really wild dreams, and see what she does with her harp... "Scrapple from the Apple"? O...K...It's jazz even though I'd never heard of the song, but it was pretty cool, though short...
So Solange, our main character goes out, trying to get a job as a harpist... In fact, if you continue reading, like I did, you will see that Solange is really somewhat, shall I say, OBSESSED, with music composition, so much so that everything she does turns into a counting of that activity to music--you know, like if the garbage truck is coming down the street, stopping at each home, there'd be a certain rhythm of the truck stopping and starting, together with the bang, bang, bang of the cans against the moving barrel...stop stop...start...start...bang, bang, OMG, she has me doing it! What fun! I hated counting when I was learning hymns, especially... I wanted to play them as I would sing the song, while my teacher wanted me to count the value of each note...Now I have to ask, just who would be singing this song, while I was playing the piano... Most people at my church were old and sang slowly--they weren't counting the note value, I can tell you!
So, anyway, Solange can't get over the death of her husband from cancer, mainly because she thinks the hospital was at fault... And she would wake up crying in loss once again about who was so good at the slow hand... But as years went by, only Mile Davis could help her fall asleep, to dream.... Or sometimes just be curious... So she does Tarot Card readings to bring in needed cash... She uses different names so people calling will never know to whom they are speaking... It's safer that way, don't you think? After all, reading the fortunes for somebody can bring them either sadness or happiness... And, if the latter, they'd want to stick with the "seer" who made them feel great. Or the opposite could also happen. And, no, I've never called for a reading... But I admit I enjoyed reading books about the personalities of different signs and measuring them with potential male friends... LOL
Do you get the idea that I'm writing differently, like, maybe to match what I had just read???
And while waiting for gigs, she continues recording her dreams in a journal, one of which spotlighted Amazing Grace, so she decided to attend her meeting of the spirituality group...which gets too close to issues that Solange was having for her to be spiritually uplifted... Or it could be the pills she took...
And she gets an audition and wows them...
Finally, she gets a gig with others with are also playing the harp....but she doesn't match the timing of the others... only she doesn't realize that it is she who is the problem... Or maybe, it's because the conductor keeps suggesting special practice with him... Practice continues! But I totally understood Solange about how she "felt" how to play the music. Fortunately when I sang, my sister was normally the pianist and she followed me, not the music... See that's why I'm reading further...
Well, after all you have learned about the book, I am positive that you will never think how the book ends! Nor how much you may have found you've enjoyed this quirky harp player when she forgets about anything but her music... with maybe a little tequila nearby...
Suzann Kale is an author that you need to at least read once or you won't know what you've missed! And if you are quirky pharmaceutically-challenged, but NOT a harp player, I think you'll totally want to read this one!
GABixlerReviews - Check out excerpt and harp music selections at https://gabixlerreviews-bookreadersheaven.blogspot.com/2024/04/midnight-tequila-midlife-crisis-of.html
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