After the death of Finn's wife, he finds himself penniless and with nowhere to go but West to live with his daughter in Venice Beach. As soon as he feels ready to dig his way out of the darkness, he finds himself the prime suspect in a murder investigation that threatens his life as he has come to know it.
Finn, a hard-drinking and cantankerous Irish writer, is in the midst of a downward spiral. After the death of his wife, he finds himself penniless and with nowhere to go but West to live with his daughter in Venice Beach. There he meets an eccentric cast of determined survivors who help give him the inspiration to get back to the success he once knew. As soon as he feels ready to dig his way out of the darkness, he finds himself the prime suspect in a murder investigation that threatens his life as he has come to know it.
Professional Reviews
Chico Enterprise-Record
In the acknowledgments to her just-published novel, Chicoan Emily Gallo makes special mention of Tin Roof Bakery and Cafe, “where I spent many hours writing over endless cups of Earl Grey.”
Her protagonist, Finn (Finnegan) McGee, who “arrived in New York at age eighteen after a dirt-poor, miserable childhood in Ireland and never went back,” favors whiskey rather than tea. McGee became a best-selling writer but now his best-selling days seem long past. After the death of his second wife, McGee, penniless and often drunk, heads to Los Angeles to stay with his daughter Kate, “an attractive, athletic, forty-two year old with a short pixie haircut, slightly built and spry like her father.”
Kate lives in a town where everybody walks, a place that’s a magnet to the homeless of every description. “Venice Beach” ($14.95 in paperback from CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; also for Amazon Kindle) ushers the reader into the sights and sounds of the famous boardwalk.
“There were singers and dancers doing everything from reggae to hip-hop to eye-popping break dancing. A muscular man wearing a bright royal blue speedo whizzed past on rollerblades followed by a man adorned with twigs and leaves walking on stilts. There were acrobats walking across tightropes and jumping over a line of six or seven people touching their toes. A man did a twenty-minute interactive show walking barefoot on broken glass as professional as any you’d see in Las Vegas.”
As Finn sinks further into booze and pills, he befriends some of the boardwalk oddballs, like Bella, a hoarder and Holocaust survivor, and Jed, a mysterious man with a cat named Mother whose past becomes both Finn’s liberation and maybe his demise.
The novel is compulsively readable and more is promised from Gallo’s talented pen.
Readers' Favorite
Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
Venice Beach is a contemporary fiction novel written by Emily Gallo. Maggie's long illness and eventual death took a toll on Finn that left him heartbroken, penniless, and with a bad case of writer's block. His publisher had gotten tired of waiting for his next best-selling work, and his only option was to move from the New York City he had loved all his adult life out to his daughter Kate's home in Venice Beach, California. Kate's mother died when she was quite young, so Finn had assumed the role of full-time parent while teaching school at the same time. Now Kate was teaching out on the west coast. The father and daughter are both somewhat anxious about this new living arrangement. Finn's whiskey diet and unconventional lifestyle disturbs Kate, and she has to fight the compulsion to micromanage her father's activities. Finn, meanwhile, has a whole new world to explore on the famous boardwalk of this historic California town, and he might just find his salvation hidden amongst the oddly compelling characters he meets there.
Emily Gallo's contemporary fiction novel, Venice Beach, is peopled with characters you'll want to know more about. There's the hoarder who once lived in Beverly Hills, the survivor of the Jonestown Massacre whose cat is called Mother, and a host of other compelling denizens of Venice Beach and its environs. I loved reading about Finn's adventures and seeing how the shell-shocked widower and has-been author starts to build his world anew. Gallo tackles a number of issues in this adult version of a coming of age story: the Jonestown tragedy, homelessness, the foster care system and the safety nets that sometimes do work, and the inevitable stresses and strains that occur when an elder parent comes to live with a child, and her treatment of each is deft and empathic. Her writing style is assured and meshes quite well with her gift at storytelling. I found myself swiftly drawn into Finn's story and was pleased to discover that Gallo has written a sequel to this remarkable and heartwarming tale. Venice Beach is most highly recommended.
Marge Gonzalez
Venice Beach by Emily Gallo 50’s. This is the first in a series of novels that features a Jonestown survivor, Jed. Having already read The Columbarium, the second in the series, I decided to begin at the beginning and find out more about the psychological complexity of Jed. I t turns out that Finn is the character who takes center stage. A formerly successful writer who has taken to drink (contending that he is not an alcoholic but “just Irish”), Finn moves from New York to his daughter’s home in California after the death of his wife. Unable to break through his writer’s block, he frequents the boardwalk of Venice Beach where he encounters, among others, a charming hoarder/Holocaust survivor, an aspiring writer who idolizes him, a cat named Mother, Jamaican street performers, and Jed, now homeless, whose life is haunted by the childhood he spent in Guyana and the searing memory of the death of his mother and sister in the infamous mass suicide-murder. Uncovering Jed’s story provides Finn a path to a meaningful book. You would think that I have given the whole plot away. But no. Strange coincidences and dangers are at the heart of the story, and the warmth of human bonds permeates the book. The plot twists got me up at 5AM to see how it all came out. I am looking forward to the sequel to The Columbarium.
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