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lavoiture's review against another edition
4.0
Despite the fact that these books are a white guy's fantasy of living in Bangkok, I adore them, and am sad that this is the last in the series. I love Miaow and Rose and have a fondness for Poke. Hallinan also does a pitch-perfect job of writing Thai-English and capturing BKK at its best and worst.
Bangkok lovers, read the series from the beginning - worth it.
Bangkok lovers, read the series from the beginning - worth it.
bob_dw's review against another edition
3.0
The final installment in a series focusing on the assembled family of Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer, and his Thai wife, Rose, who adopted a Bangkok street child named Miaow. An at times wrenching story of the downfall of a poor girl from a small village in the evil big city. For those who have enjoyed the series this should be a satisfying end to a series with engaging and interesting characters. This is the first in the series for me and I think I would have rated it higher if I had read the whole series in order.
3no7's review against another edition
4.0
“Street Music” by Timothy Hallinan is part of the “Poke Rafferty” series. Rafferty, whose real name is Philip but everyone calls him Poke, narrates this story of his life, adventures, and misadventures in Bangkok. This is mostly just the back-and-forth dialogue that constitutes his life as if having a chat with friends. At times the story continues in another perspective so readers learn what Rafferty does not yet know. This is Rafferty’s personal story filled with family trauma, family joy, and family love. Readers get to know all the people first, connect with them, and establish relationships with them; the history, the mystery, and the connections come later. Rafferty struggles to adjust to his ever more complicated life and to resolve long buried secrets from the past.
The strength of the story lies in the little details, the vignettes that provide the vivid background for events and create character and life on every page.
“Street Music” opens slowly by establishing characters and relationships, thus setting the scene for events that follow. It is filled with social commentary, personal relationships, and cultural nuances. Hallinan’s descriptions paint vibrant scenes on every page. I received a review copy of “Street Music” from Timothy Hallinan, Soho Crime, and Random House Publishing. Every word was a joy to read.
The strength of the story lies in the little details, the vignettes that provide the vivid background for events and create character and life on every page.
“The fine spun flaxen hair he was born with, absolutely straight, standing at vertical attention atop his head as though his toe were in a socket.”Hallinan makes even an ordinary little incident important, interesting, and mysterious.
“She took a fall not too long ago, recently enough that she still hurts, recently enough that she’s still trailing the pink ghost of pain and her palms still sting.”
“Street Music” opens slowly by establishing characters and relationships, thus setting the scene for events that follow. It is filled with social commentary, personal relationships, and cultural nuances. Hallinan’s descriptions paint vibrant scenes on every page. I received a review copy of “Street Music” from Timothy Hallinan, Soho Crime, and Random House Publishing. Every word was a joy to read.
3no7's review against another edition
4.0
“Street Music” by Timothy Hallinan is part of the “Poke Rafferty” series. Rafferty, whose real name is Philip but everyone calls him Poke, narrates this story of his life, adventures, and misadventures in Bangkok. This is mostly just the back-and-forth dialogue that constitutes his life as if having a chat with friends. At times the story continues in another perspective so readers learn what Rafferty does not yet know. This is Rafferty’s personal story filled with family trauma, family joy, and family love. Readers get to know all the people first, connect with them, and establish relationships with them; the history, the mystery, and the connections come later. Rafferty struggles to adjust to his ever more complicated life and to resolve long buried secrets from the past.
The strength of the story lies in the little details, the vignettes that provide the vivid background for events and create character and life on every page.
“Street Music” opens slowly by establishing characters and relationships, thus setting the scene for events that follow. It is filled with social commentary, personal relationships, and cultural nuances. Hallinan’s descriptions paint vibrant scenes on every page. I received a review copy of “Street Music” from Timothy Hallinan, Soho Crime, and Random House Publishing. Every word was a joy to read.
The strength of the story lies in the little details, the vignettes that provide the vivid background for events and create character and life on every page.
“The fine spun flaxen hair he was born with, absolutely straight, standing at vertical attention atop his head as though his toe were in a socket.”Hallinan makes even an ordinary little incident important, interesting, and mysterious.
“She took a fall not too long ago, recently enough that she still hurts, recently enough that she’s still trailing the pink ghost of pain and her palms still sting.”
“Street Music” opens slowly by establishing characters and relationships, thus setting the scene for events that follow. It is filled with social commentary, personal relationships, and cultural nuances. Hallinan’s descriptions paint vibrant scenes on every page. I received a review copy of “Street Music” from Timothy Hallinan, Soho Crime, and Random House Publishing. Every word was a joy to read.
vkemp's review
5.0
Poke Rafferty's wife, Rose, former Patpong bar girl, has finally had her baby. It's a boy and Rose has named him Frank after Poke's father; Poke prefers Arithit, in honor of his friend in the Thai police. But, Poke is not going to rock the boat at this delicate stage of the game. Every day, Rose's friends fill the house, especially Fon, who is keeping the house running. Miaow, their adopted daughter is rehearsing for her role as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, at school. Her boyfriend, Edward, has been cast as Freddy. One morning, Miaow opens the door and screams and runs into back into her room, slamming and locking the door behind her. Poke sees a small woman standing at the door, who appears to be a street person. He takes her to a local sundae shop and extracts the story of Miaow and how she came to Bangkok. It is a tragedy, but a story that needs telling. I am so sad to see the end of the Poke Rafferty books. I have learned so much about Thailand and appreciate the author's ability to place the readers directly into the story and the locale. This is one of the best crime series in fiction. don't miss it.
samhouston's review
4.0
Poke Rafferty, always the champion of the underdog in any situation, is a good man. And now that Tim Hallinan has decided to end his Poke Rafferty series at nine books – Street Music being that ninth book – I’m going to have to learn to do without a new Poke Rafferty novel every year. A big part of the overall appeal of the Poke Rafferty books is their Bangkok setting and the little family that Poke, his Thai wife Rose, and Miaow, the little street girl they adopted several books back, have stitched together for themselves. The crime-fighting thrills along the way (and make no mistake, these are first rate thrillers) turn out to be the icing on what is already a damn fine cake.
The big surprise in Street Music is that it is not really a book about Poke Rafferty. Instead, this is a book about his daughter, one that explores Miaow’s origins and why the five-or-six-year-old (no one knows her real age prior to the revelations of Street Music) was living on Bangkok’s streets when Poke took her into his home eight years earlier. It took Miaow a long time to learn to trust in the permanence of her new family, but she finally got there. Now, it is not so surprising that she is reacting to the presence of her new baby brother pretty much the way any teen who unexpectedly loses only-child status might react: with a purposeful indifference to the boy and a whole lot of jealousy at all the attention he is getting.
Poke, too, is finding it a bit difficult to adjust to little Frank’s high rank in the family hierarchy. In addition to Poke having to spend his nights on a lumpy couch while Rose tends to Frank’s every need, the Rafferty apartment is almost constantly filled with Rose’s friends, all there to help and to admire Frank, so Poke is starting to feel a bit unnecessary. With all the ruckus, he has become a travel writer who can’t write, can’t sleep, and can’t get much of his wife’s attention. Poke badly needs something to keep him busy, so when one of regulars at Leon and Toot’s (formerly the Expat Bar) goes missing, Poke is more than willing to investigate the old man’s disappearance.
Then it happens. Someone shows up at Poke’s door whom he never expected to see, someone with the power to tear his little family apart forever. And it turns out that Poke kind of likes her.
Street Music is a fitting farewell to Poke Rafferty in the sense that he has reached a stage of life in which it is appropriately time for him to slow down a little and start thinking more about the future of his wife and two children. Even now, although Poke cannot quite resist the familiar urge to help people who are so lost that they can’t help themselves anymore, his family is always on his mind, influencing just how much he is willing to put himself at risk to help others.
So, take care of yourself and the family, Poke. We are going to miss each and every one of you.
Bottom Line: Street Music is probably not the sendoff that most longtime Poke Rafferty fans expected it would be, but it is a satisfying enough last look at Poke and everyone in his world. The only quarrel I have with the novel is more a technical one than a plot-based one. The book is broken into three parts, with Part I being largely the set-up to what will follow next, Part II being the (I think) too-long backstory of the character who knocks so unexpectedly on Poke’s door, and Part III being the resolution of the book’s two plot lines. Part II, at something like 130 pages of the e-book’s 366 total pages, probably because I already knew this is Poke’s last hurrah, just seemed to go on forever, and I grew frustrated as the remaining page-count kept dwindling away for so long. My reaction to Part II may be more a compliment to my devotion to the Poke Rafferty character than to anything else, but I know that I would have gladly traded some of the pages of Part II for additional pages in Parts I or III.
The big surprise in Street Music is that it is not really a book about Poke Rafferty. Instead, this is a book about his daughter, one that explores Miaow’s origins and why the five-or-six-year-old (no one knows her real age prior to the revelations of Street Music) was living on Bangkok’s streets when Poke took her into his home eight years earlier. It took Miaow a long time to learn to trust in the permanence of her new family, but she finally got there. Now, it is not so surprising that she is reacting to the presence of her new baby brother pretty much the way any teen who unexpectedly loses only-child status might react: with a purposeful indifference to the boy and a whole lot of jealousy at all the attention he is getting.
Poke, too, is finding it a bit difficult to adjust to little Frank’s high rank in the family hierarchy. In addition to Poke having to spend his nights on a lumpy couch while Rose tends to Frank’s every need, the Rafferty apartment is almost constantly filled with Rose’s friends, all there to help and to admire Frank, so Poke is starting to feel a bit unnecessary. With all the ruckus, he has become a travel writer who can’t write, can’t sleep, and can’t get much of his wife’s attention. Poke badly needs something to keep him busy, so when one of regulars at Leon and Toot’s (formerly the Expat Bar) goes missing, Poke is more than willing to investigate the old man’s disappearance.
Then it happens. Someone shows up at Poke’s door whom he never expected to see, someone with the power to tear his little family apart forever. And it turns out that Poke kind of likes her.
Street Music is a fitting farewell to Poke Rafferty in the sense that he has reached a stage of life in which it is appropriately time for him to slow down a little and start thinking more about the future of his wife and two children. Even now, although Poke cannot quite resist the familiar urge to help people who are so lost that they can’t help themselves anymore, his family is always on his mind, influencing just how much he is willing to put himself at risk to help others.
So, take care of yourself and the family, Poke. We are going to miss each and every one of you.
Bottom Line: Street Music is probably not the sendoff that most longtime Poke Rafferty fans expected it would be, but it is a satisfying enough last look at Poke and everyone in his world. The only quarrel I have with the novel is more a technical one than a plot-based one. The book is broken into three parts, with Part I being largely the set-up to what will follow next, Part II being the (I think) too-long backstory of the character who knocks so unexpectedly on Poke’s door, and Part III being the resolution of the book’s two plot lines. Part II, at something like 130 pages of the e-book’s 366 total pages, probably because I already knew this is Poke’s last hurrah, just seemed to go on forever, and I grew frustrated as the remaining page-count kept dwindling away for so long. My reaction to Part II may be more a compliment to my devotion to the Poke Rafferty character than to anything else, but I know that I would have gladly traded some of the pages of Part II for additional pages in Parts I or III.
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