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"  In Hot Springs (Tin House), his rollicking new novel, Geoffrey Becker has assembled a delicate collage of damaged souls. Bernice, a volatile, restless, and subtly unhinged woman, kidnaps Emily, the daughter she gave up for adoption five years earlier, and lights out across America to Tucson and, later, Baltimore; Landis, her world-weary boyfriend and accomplice, is compelled by Bernice and her cause in spite of himself; and Tessa, Emily&amp;#039;s conservative Christian adoptive mother in Colorado Springs, is forced by the abduction to face the unhappy, unholy truth about her marriage.  No one in this ensemble is particularly likable (or anyone you&amp;#039;d want to bump into at a bar), but Becker gives them to us with such earnest and empathetic insight that he makes us root for even the most ungracious among them. In their poignant tragicomic entanglements, none of these folks seems to mean anyone any harm in the course of pursuing their dreams\u2014it&amp;#039;s just that everyone else becomes collateral damage. They all believe that a fiveyear- old girl will redeem their failed lives\u2014but then find themselves wandering further than ever from the Promised Land. &amp;quot;Many evenings [Landis] had sat out staring down on the lights of the sprawling city, drinking a beer, pretending he owned the world,&amp;quot; Becker writes. &amp;quot;It hadn&amp;#039;t been happiness, exactly, not in the sense that he&amp;#039;d always assumed people were supposed to be happy, either with a lot of money or a big loving family, or maybe pursuing some dream like photographing bears at the South Pole, or even having sex with movie stars.... But there had been a stillness, the sky over him a great inverted bowl full of stars, and some nights that was exactly what he wanted.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a10843/book-release-hot-springs-393150/>