The Book of Luke by Lovell Holder
Not only has Lovell Holder crafted the most delightful redemption stories, he also managed to intrigue me with the inner workings of reality competition shows. Luke is an emotionally (and physically, sort of) broken soul on the verge of losing everything after learning his politician husband, Barnes, is the cheater of the century. That’s when fate comes calling him back to “Endeavor”, the competition series that was the catalyst of their relationship. So many secrets come out, and so many lives are changed. Read this book!
The Book of Luke by Lovell Holder, (List Price: $30, Grand Central Publishing, 9781538770153, December 2025)
Reviewed by Thomas Wallace, Reading Rock Books in Dickson, Tennessee
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“I’ve moved a lot, including back and forth across the country three times! When I moved to the Washington, DC, area, I learned about luna moths—beautiful and short-lived moths who can only be found on the eastern side of the country. This helped me realize that there would be special and unique things about my new home. Since so many kids deal with the difficult experience of moving, I thought this might be the beginning of a new story idea.”
When it comes to emotionality in the book, I wanted to portray how — this goes along with the ambiguity — multiple contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously within one person, and how our feelings may change over the day, over an hour, and over a year and a lifetime. Even the simplest things can be the hardest to say. For example, Bo really wants to tell Hans how proud he is. He tries to say it throughout the whole book. It was super frustrating to write. “Come on, Bo! You can do it!” It’s a simple and good emotion, right? You think that it should be easy, but a lifetime of normative training combined with the recurring conflicting aspects of the relationship get in the way. And in this sense, I was very inspired by my own father and grandfather. My grandfather told me how proud he was of my father and how well he’d done in life and so on, but he couldn’t tell my father that. But of course I did, and it made my dad happy. But there’s something that makes certain feelings really hard to express.
I could spend years in a cookbook shop and never get bored. Where do I begin? I love the weirdness of cookbooks; how they capture the larger culture of a specific time-period and tell the tale through the prism of food. Take, for example, one of my cookbook treasures: The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook by Robin Leach. It’s a time capsule of the eighties — glass block, Dynasty-style hairdos, Brooke Shields — and the food is as awful as the fashion. Or another favorite: A Treasury of Great Recipes by Vincent and Mary Price, a collection of all the menus that the famous horror maestro and his wife collected over their world travels in the ‘40s and ‘50s and the meals that they hosted for their friends in their exquisite Hollywood home. If I could jump into the pages of a cookbook, it might be that one.
