Sandlin writes about being cool and old.

Sandlin is always hilarious and dark. Set in 2022 a group of "hippies" in a cntinuos care facility revolt in order to be treated like people again. Many references to the 60s... I tink if I was a boomer I would have liked it even more.

Bah. I guess this was supposed to be a light-hearted "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" for the Boomer retirement set. Too bad it was about as effective as anything else that generation attempted that didn't involve personal pleasure and gain.

So the deal, basically, is that in the distant year of 2022(!), the ex-radical hippie residents of an assisted care facility are being repressed, man, by the Man, man. Well, okay, really we're only talking about the nurses, and the orderlies that aren't allowing the rickety old retired granola farmers to smoke banana peels and wiggle nekkid to bad cover versions of "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" or "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree" and songs of similar quality. Those big Blue Meanies!

So what's a useless, pot smoking AARP member to do? Why, start a revolution, of course! Cast off those cruel shackles of the (figuratively) toothless Nurse Ratched stand-in! Gee golly gosh! A totally effective and selfless act of social progress and enlightenment! Just like Mom used to make!

Well, considering the cultural history of the "revolutionaries" in question, it comes as no surprise that all their slogans might as well be boiled down to "GIMME IT I WANT IT IT'S MINE". All that "social justice" crap is just window dressing -- the so-called revolutionaries are and have always been really just concerned with chasing their own pleasures.

Look, not a single one of these arrested-development Earth Shoe types gives a single fucking thought as to, say, improving working conditions for all those brown people barely scraping by on the piddling checks they get for wiping the saggy asses of old hippies who couldn't even tell you the name of any given nurse. There's no consideration towards, I dunno ... maybe peacefully sitting down with the Administrator and talking through their differences in a rap session? (That's "rap session" in the 60's sense. A discussion, in other words. Beat boxing is not involved, and anyway that's something those brown people do. Totally valid form of free expression, yes. And so... colorful. But we revolutionaries are involved in something a whole lot deeper and significant).

The administrator, along with those brown people who keep these old gummers from choking on their soup really only represent obstacles to be compacted and confined while the hippies get down to the Serious Business of spiking the Metamucil with LSD. It's just like the flower-children side of the 60's: GIMME IT I WANT IT IT'S MINE.


I love the hell out of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". I really do. But this? I had about 30 pages of the book left to go. The pigs were en route to stage the Final Confrontation. Well, I absent-mindedly left the book in a restaurant. I was six steps into the parking lot when I realized the book was still inside. I just kept walking. I figure that if the uprising of these geriatric stoners is anything like the ones in their heyday, then they're all doomed. Chemical lobotomies for the lot of 'em.

And nothing of value is lost.

Great title! Jimi Hendrix would turn 80 in 2022, the year the book takes place in. No Jimi Hendrix was harmed in the production of this story, which is a dark humor farce satire concerning the plight of senior citizens, a comedy with some poignant moments. It has a few Frank Zappa, Procol Harum, Janis Joplin, etc. references. The author spares no one, but as the blurb on the back indicates, he has great sympathy for all.

I don't imagine that there are a lot of funny novels about assisted living, but Sandlin's, the only one that I have encountered, has an inspired idea at its heart. What if the residents of an assisted living facility all yearn strongly enough for their favorite decade (the 1960s) that they recreate it in their living unit. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and political attitude. As a product of that time, ambivalent about both that decade and the prospect of assisted living, I found Sandlin to be both funny and slyly satirical.

This was a very fun read! It takes place in "the future" @ a nursing home, who's residents, are/were all "love children", in the 60s...hence the title of the book. The author, Tim Sandlin, has written a few other books. I did ATTEMPT to read his other books, after having read this one, but the story lines, were a little to dark/obscure, for me. But, definitely, if you are a Jimi Hendrix fan & of the 60s era & all that it empowered...Woodstock, etc..You will enjoy this book!

Really liked this book. I've always kind of wished I grew up in the hippie era. And I work in a nursing home so this was pretty funny for me to read.

I was really disappointed with this book. I thought I was going to like it a lot more than I did. It started off strong, and as the storyline went to hell, the book just got weaker. Not sure I will be reading more by Sandlin.

I had a grand time with this book. It's a cautionary tale on many levels. It's 2022, and there's a deceptively pleasant-looking, upscale retirement home populated almost entirely by aging hippies and freaks. Unfortunately, they are being patronized and in many ways abused by their avaricious adult children and by a corrupt management. When one resident's cat gets confiscated, the community pulls out of its cliquishness and takes two hostages, renames the grounds Pepperland, and figures out to govern themselves. There's a bit of a murder mystery and lots of intrigue as well as repeated "put down the book and chuckle" ironic humor in the residents' interactions and competitiveness over where they were in 1968. As a California native who often finds that writers from elsewhere are lax in their research and make silly errors in describing or characterizing this area, I must say that Sandlin, who hails from Wyoming, seems to have done his homework enough to understand the Bay Area. His futuristic world is an unexpected mix of dark underground journey and sweetly lit fable, and it's fun to observe from here.

This book is uneven. It's got some good storytelling, and a hint of a good idea--'60s radicals, now in their 70s, take over the nursing home where they feel they have been treated unfairly. Written in 2007 but set in 2022, it tries to take on issues like conservatorship (long before Britney Spears' struggle brought it into mainstream consciousness). I like that, I like some of the story.

The book struggles with too many characters without having each being identifiable enough, and it also leans way too much on physical descriptions of characters, most egregiously the "180 pound woman" who is apparently just so gol-darn fat, that's her only trait, she's fat, and her daughter put her in the home because she's fat. (There's also an "Asian anchor and a black anchor" at a news station--not that this isn't worth mentioning, but does it have to be the only way they're referred to?)

This book is pretty darn boomer-y. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think I would recommend this book to anyone.

It's 2022 (the year Jimi Hendrix would have turned 80), and the unwilling residents of Mission Pescadero Assisted Living and Nursing Center are pissed. And they have experience with revolution.

What happens next ranges from hysterically funny to profoundly touching. Everyone born between 1945 and 1958 will recognize themselves or someone they know so they should all read it. Their children should all read it so they know what to expect from us.

It's set in the year 2022 (written 2007) and concerns a nursing home full of (mostly) old hippies. They're tired of being ruled with an iron fist by the evil administrator and medicated into oblivion by her evil henchman doctor. So they take over. I think we're supposed to be sympathetic to the old hippies, but, in the course of being farcical, the author makes them into self-absorbed caricatures.
As with many of the original hippies, there is no thought about any other oppressed groups. Of course, they're almost all white and middle class. When they take over the home, much of the lower-paid staff (orderlies, food service, nursing assistants) go with them and continue to care for them without pay. It's entirely unclear why the workers do this, as they do not share economic class or color with the hippies, and the hippies aren't even particularly nice to them.
As in life, various random things happen without being part of the plot.
It drags on for quite some time, and then the author decides to resolve it by having the governor of CA (a really cool chick) arrive by airplane to sing Jefferson Airplane songs and tell the fuzz to back off. One of the characters actually SAYS, "This is what they call a deus ex machina." Yes, it is.
Skip this Tim Sandlin book and try any of his others if you like dry humor and eccentric characters in unexpected places. His best known books, I think, are part of the the GroVont (Gros Ventre) trilogy set in Wyoming. MUCH better than this one.