Hidden Complexities and Missed Opportunities
39: Your Last Birthday
by Timothy Gene Sojka
Castroville, Texas: Black Rose Writing, 2023.
261 pages, $15.95 Paperback.
Reviewed by
Derrick Roberts II
39: Your Last Birthday, by Timothy Gene Sojka, is a novel with enough thematic concepts for a trilogy. It switches between mystery, thriller, crime, and drama, and the story has engaging twists that will keep readers wondering what will happen next, but the narrative holds the reader’s attention at a cost. There is an uncertainty of the story’s goal. Some characters who feel important disappear early only to reappear in the final pages. The protagonist, Tails, is uninteresting outside of his alcoholism, and at times it feels as if the author is forcing a likability on him. Oddly enough, Tails’s alcoholism is the one thing that makes you cheer for him.
The novel starts with Tails’s drinking problem and being transferred to a baseball team in Texas under the condition that he attends AA meetings and stays away from the bottle. While boring, one empathizes with him. He’s self-destructive, and readers wait for the moment that he succumbs to temptation; however, the love interest, Elora, manages to keep him focused on his career. A third of the novel is dedicated to their budding relationship. Just as Tails develops as a character, there is a M. Night Shyamalan twist that Elora was possibly a figment of Tails’s imagination. This trend continues throughout and sometimes feels meaningless. Alcoholism began as a major plot point. Then, one-night Tails spirals into a mountain of alcohol, and the plot point subsequently disappears We never see him struggle with alcohol again, as though he needed just one more night of overconsumption to rid himself of it—and this is in the first third of the book.
While there are plotting issues, Sojka’s writing keeps people invested. The pacing clips at an excellent pace. Assuming this is a story about healing one’s trauma by confronting the past, you go from pitying Tails’s alcoholism to cheering for him as he suffers from Silver Medal Syndrome. One of the book’s best elements is Sojka’s voice. He is a beautiful scene-setter. Tails’s narration is one you want listen to for hours around a campfire. I was drawn in by sentences such as, “Discomfort often blooms into fear. Picture walking through pines and undergrowth, muted moonlight fights intermittently into your field of vision.” Tails says this randomly at a dinner table, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to naturally speak like this in conversation, but Tails manages to—wooing both Elora and me with his words.
The story is riddled with these lines, and I believe that’s the selling point of this novel. I found it hard to believe that I was willing to read an uninteresting character’s narration for hours. However, that’s the beauty of it. Everyone around Tails was better and more interesting. He spent his time telling other people’s stories because he knew his own were unsatisfying. While I would have loved to see Tails grow into an interesting character, I can’t deny that his telling of ghost stories involving his grandfather, the mythic headless horseman of a small town, or the curse that takes the eldest son’s life for each generation was better than whatever personal narrative that Tails could have produced about himself. The affairs, conspiracies, murder—so much is happening that is bigger than the protagonist, and you are constantly reminded of that.
The words are beautiful, but it is hard to pinpoint what the novel intends to be. You believe it to be a story about battling the memories and secrets that lead to Tails’s alcoholism, but then halfway through, you find out that the alcoholism was only a catalyst and had little to do with the main point of the story. You become exhausted as you try to cling to whatever meaning you can find. However, you cannot put down the book because you want to know what happens next, what wild twist is going to happen. While unfocused, that beautiful writing of Sojka makes me proud to have it in my book collection.
Derrick Roberts II is a graduate student at Texas State University.