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Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Sunday, July 20, 2008

This List for Sunday, July 20, 2008

John Mellencamp | “Death Angel” | “How to Be Single”

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In “Life Death Love and Freedom” (Hear Music), John Mellencamp is at his most serious. Not to mention his most forlorn: “Life is an abstraction, and it tries to fool us all, and it’s working so far, it seems,” the normally feisty Hoosier sings on “Young Without Lovers.” There’s a full band backing him up, and a supple roots-rock groove with T-Bone Burnett producing and playing guitar, but the songs are uncommonly intimate, as if Mellencamp were singing them to himself, in between puffs on a cigarette in a darkened room, doing penance for forcing TV viewers to hear his “Our Country” Chevy commercials hundreds of thousands of times. And “Life Death Love and Freedom” is just about good enough to earn him forgiveness.

- Dan DeLuca, The Philadelphia Inquirer

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“Death Angel” by Linda Howard (Ballantine Books, $26) is not your normal and beloved nice-boy-meets-nice-girl-and-overcomes-obstacles-to-savor-their-love-happily-ever-after sort of book.

Oh, the hero and heroine overcome obstacles all right. The biggest two being their own immorality.

Drea has lived a life of luxury thanks to becoming the girlfriend of a drug lord. Simon meets her though his job — an assassin for hire.

The scene where they realize they have “feelings” for each other is rather sordid, but the book is well-written and Drea and Simon, while unscrupulous initially, do become rather likeable.

- Lezlie Patterson, McClatchy Newspapers

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The question makes unattached women of a certain age cringe: Why are you still single? The answer is simple — because men are married, stupid, selfish or all three — writes Liz Tuccillo in her captivating new novel, “How to Be Single” (Atria, $24.95).

Narrator Julie Jensen, a 38-year-old book publicist, hasn’t been in a serious relationship for six years and her New York City friends are in various stages of unattachment when the novel begins. She strikes out on a book project to discover if there’s any place on Earth where women are better at being alone.

The novel probably won’t reveal anything groundbreaking to readers of Tuccillo’s previous book, “He’s Just Not That Into You” (written with Greg Behrendt) or viewers of

“Sex and the City,” for which Tuccillo was an executive story editor. But “How to Be Single” is a big improvement on some of the junk that masquerades as chick lit.

- Hannah Sampson, McClatchy Newspapers