Amazon.com (ISBN 0811834956, Hardcover)

And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You is the debut novel from Kathi Kamen Goldmark, the San Francisco musician who started the Rock Bottom Remainders, the publishing-world supergroup whose members include Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Molly Ivins, and Carl Hiassen. Goldmark, formerly the group's token nonwriter, has produced a novel about Sarah Jean Pixlie, a Bay Area country singer who stumbles into stardom. The book is utterly shapeless when it comes to plot, and can be oddly uninformative about key moments of Sarah Jean's life (like, say, the birth of her child). Still, Goldmark writes with a rollicking good humor that's oddly infectious. She's like a bar band that you can't help but enjoy just because they're having so much fun. And her passages on musical mores have an easygoing, insiderish feel. Here she writes about life on the road:

Pretty soon there were at least fifteen sweaty band and crew members sprawled on the bed, chairs, and floor. Sacks of fast-food takeout and a couple of bottles appeared. It's the truth that Wild Turkey on ice from the machine down the hall, in a hotel bathroom glass, can make you a very special kind of stupid.

The whole affair is plagued by a gimmick that quickly palls: Sarah Jean has a habit of turning her troubles into cute country-western lyrics--which are, sadly, included in the book. --Claire Dederer