The Talented Ribkins (2017) by Ladee Hubbard

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Talented Ribkins (2017)

by Ladee Hubbard

Gideon Lane, Lehigh Acres, Florida

Florida: 14/21

    The Talented Ribkins truly disappointed me in that I wanted to really like it but did not. Author Ladee Hubbard combines elements of super-hero lit and crime fiction with the more traditional man-unraveling-family-issues situation to produce a book that fails to transcend any of those genres or fuse into something different and new.  I have no issue with writers of literary fiction infusing their work with genre elements- quite the opposite, as I've written many times, but if all those elements are going to be uninteresting, why bother.

  Such is the case here, where the protagonist, Johnny Ribkins, 72, is driving all over Florida to pay back a shadowy south Florida power broker.   As the plot unfurled along the different axises:  The shadowy super-hero back story, the complicated personal history, and the whodunit surrounding the mysterious death of his brother, I found myself uninterested in all three at once.