My first celebrity crush was Shawn Cassidy. I had a Shawn Cassidy pennant in my room.
Then, I fell for Mark Hamill. Yeah, no Harrison Ford for me.
When I became the first kid at my Catholic school with access to MTV, I hardly knew where to land my preadolescent heart or for that matter, how not to wear big hoop earrings to avoid the wrath of Sister Catherine. Rick Springfield was on MTV. He hit the women and girls of the world firing on all cylinders. Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital. Rock star on the radio and in videos. We fell in L-O-V-E.
However, when you idolize someone, you do not want to know about his every utterance or faux pas. Trust me, you do not. That’s why young readers crush on Four, Edward, Eric, and the tap keeps flowing. If they ever heard the actual men whine over an actual paper cut, I suspect the devotion might wane a bit. Celebrities are somewhat as fictitious as these literary creations.
Thus, I was hesitant to pick up the advance reader copy of Magnificent Vibration, Rick Springfield’s forthcoming novel, from the shelves at Octavia Books. What if, quite frankly, it was not so good and damaged my nostalgic feelings about all things Rick? I tweeted about the book. Had anyone out there read it? Could we talk about it? Did anyone out there know about it?
In what I can only call a magnificent vibration, Mr. Springfield’s literary agent followed the tweets. We began to chat, and before I knew it we were hosting THE Rick Springfield at our store. Now, I had to read the book, if I could wrest it back from my co-worker who had absconded (I look for a chance to use this word wherever I can) with it.
The book starts off with some serious “boy” humor (think of the scene from Varsity Blues where the sex ed class comes up with 101 euphemisms for masturbation). Horatio/Bob, the main character, is a sexually-charged, recent divorcé, searching for salvation in a self-help book he steals. Inside he finds a number and makes a call to God. God is like a Twain/Vonnegut/Christopher Moore deity than any benevolent being. Poor Horatio meets a hot woman and another fella, who seem to be in a similar crisis, and they join forces to discover why they have been thrown together in the first place. Told from varying perspectives threaded together in the end, the book touches on the hunt for meaning we all embark on in some form or another.
My feelings for Rick remain intact.
~VK Brooks-Sigler
Octavia Books 