After Hours at the Almost Home by Tara Yellen
Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 13: 978-1-932961-48-5
6 x 9 / 256 pages / $14.95
April 2008
Summary | Note to Readers | Praise | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Widgets | Bio | Events
Summary
It’s Super Bowl Sunday at the Almost Home Bar and Grill with the hometown Broncos playing for their second championship in a row, and the already busy night is about to get busier. When the bartender walks off, she leaves the remaining staff to the chaos of the night—and with the real question. Not why did she leave but why do they stay? After closing time and on a school night, Colleen’s 14-year-old daughter is no stranger to the Almost Home. She’ll do almost anything to leave, to move her life forward or somehow return to earlier, better times, anywhere but here. But it doesn’t matter; there seems to be no way out.
For one night, we follow all of them as they make their cash, close up, and then linger into the after hours, as they always do, their lives colliding, past and present, in the dark back corner at table 14—drinking, talking, and, now, in the wake of Marna’s absence, facing questions: Where did she go? Will she return? Why do we stay? How dangerous is restaurant love?
Smart, provocative, and flawlessly on target, Tara Yellen’s revealing debut offers keen insights on a group of people left to put the pieces of their own lives back together in the wake of a friend's disappearance. After Hours at the Almost Home will put you in an altered state—it's got kick and goes down like a shot. But its effects might be far more lasting.
Note to Readers by Tara Yellen
I started waiting tables to meet people. I was busy with school and writing, and it struck me as an efficient way to work in a social life. Plus, standing at the bar was much easier when you were holding a tray. I had a script, a reason to be moving through the room, dipping in and out of conversations. And I did meet people, as I traveled around the country, working in dive bars and family restaurants and fine dining. A saloon in rural Indiana. A San Francisco wine bar. I met people I’d never have met otherwise. The customers, sure, but, even more, my coworkers—the bartenders and servers and overtired managers. The line cooks who had the best drugs. We were from all over. A random conglomeration of people, we’d ended up in the same place at the same time.
I was working in a bar in Denver and one night I came in for my shift and found out that one of the scheduled servers—someone we all liked, who’d been there for years—didn’t show up. That was it. She just didn’t come in and we never saw her again. I remember getting a strong sense from that, of the restaurant business as a whole, this close-knit community that was nevertheless transient, where no one really got richer or poorer, paid off their debts, stayed in love. People came and went. We grew close quickly, unified against the customer, and then switched formations. The faces changed, the relationships didn’t. And yet, though they were fast, these connections were not meaningless. Something always happens when lives bump up against each other.Praise
"[T]he employees at the Almost Home could break your heart -- all lost and found at the same time. Colleen, a waitress, keeps spotting the ghost of her young husband, hit by a car two years earlier. She brings her 14-year-old daughter, Lily, to work with her. Lily steals the show. How can you learn how to be an adult when all the adults around you act like children? "After Hours" is a snapshot of a novel, lovingly contained between the neon sign and the back door. Contents under pressure." —The Los Angeles Times
"In the film Waking Life, Louis Mackey poses this conundrum: 'Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?' The answer is both, and in this, her debut novel, Tara Yellen shows us how easily—and inevitably—we get stuck in our ruts." —Paste Magazine
"How's the read? From all reports, mighty fine. Rocky critic Verna Noel Jones has selected the story of the intersecting lives at the Almost Home as one of her favorite debut novels of 2008. And independent book retailers have chosen it as a Book Sense pick for May. Which I guess makes Yellen something of a hometown hero." —Rocky Mountain News
“Edgier than Cheers, as bawdy as Boccaccio's Decameron and as witty as Muriel Sparks' The Girls of Slender Means.” —John Casey
"Tara Yellen’s novel includes plenty of male characters, but it strikes me as a book about women: how they cope...and how making a living is all too often interchangeable with making a life." —Ann Beattie
“Tara Yellen writes with extraordinary warmth and compassion, and with sly humor and flawless perceptiveness.” —Chris Tilghman
"Ms. Yellen is the real article, a writer with a rich vein of talent, and the will to use it. We will all be reading her books over the next decade." —Richard Bausch
“[A] very well-written, constantly compelling story of flawed, but very real characters trying to live life with as much love, luck and human warmth as they can find. This is a very promising first novel…”—Rich Rennicks, Malaprop’s Bookstore (NC)
Customer Review from B&N.com:
"You do not have to read very far into this book to know that you are in for a very real experience. Unfolding over the span of one night at the Almost Home Bar and Grill, we meet the new waitress JJ, her co-workers, thirteen year old Lily, and the eclectic regulars as they go about their business on Super Bowl Sunday. Yellen offers an achingly raw new voice in fiction, effortlessly moving from one character's perspective to another (angsty teen to slightly drunk middle-aged man to innocent new girl trying to fit it) for a more complete scene. With moments recognizable to everyone, you will find yourself being pulled along with the characters as they hurtle towards events that never happen or never were to begin with." —Chelsea W., a book lover, 4 out of 5 stars
Bio
Born in Colorado, Tara Yellen grew up in Western New York, zigzagged back and forth across the country, and now finds herself in Washington, D.C. She was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program, and her fiction has appeared in such magazines as Five Points and Prism International. After Hours at the Almost Home is her first novel.
Unbridled Aloud featuring Tara Yellen
Tara's Reading at the New Dominion Bookshop
Excerpt
Click here to download a free PDF of the first two chapters!
It was 1:15, a half-hour before last call—a half-hour before Lily. Only the bar itself was still crowded, and even there things were winding down, everyone paid up, people hovering more than anything else, making halfhearted attempts at complaining and debating—the Broncos, John Elway, the previous year’s Senate race, the wrestler-turned-governor—all of it falling away as people left, first in a rush and then one by one, so that the TVs, too loud now, made the most convincing arguments of all, about dish soap and beer and replayed newscasts of the downtown celebrations. Police scattering crowds. One TV was turned to a cooking show, the chef folding something pink into something yellow. Gently, gently, his voice warbled, and Denny reached up and flicked off the volume. He was working up a sweat at the sink, washing the glassware that JJ was collecting for him. She swooped back and forth between the tables in a wild sort of dance. The place was a disaster, of course—a couple overturned chairs, used napkins and dirty plates everywhere—but it was nothing the usual sweep-through wouldn’t fix. Glassware then plates then garbage then Windex. Then taking out the garbage and restocking. Every night, the same routine. It was always doable, Colleen reminded herself. It never seemed doable, but it always was, when you broke it down.