I have to say that I never felt such a roller coaster of emotions with a book before I read Hollywood Park. Sure I’ve cried a few times or gotten angry or laughed with books, but not in the way that I was invested with this book. It was shocking to me that Mikel’s parents were ok with how he was raised, that they didn’t think it was wrong. My heart broke for him when it became clear that he though it was a little boy’s job to take care of his mother, when realistically it is supposed to be the other way around. Everything he went through, the deeply depressed mother and rough around the edges father, drugs, loss, coming of age…. all of it was expressed in such a poetic way that it made you feel. I felt like I experienced it all with Mikel, yet I was sitting on my couch in the safety of my own home in the year 2020. I had never heard of Synanon before, but that doesn’t surprise me as I was born in September of ‘89 and don’t know much of cults and other big events outside of what was taught in a classroom or that I’ve stumbled across in serial killer documentaries. This was truly an amazing work of art! In his interview with Celadon Mikel was asked “What do you want people to take away from Hollywood Park?”, and his response was “I guess there are some fancy things I could say about emotional resonance, landscapes of the mind, and the sob in the spine of the artist-reader (that’s how Nabokov put it), but any first-time author is lying who doesn’t simply say, I really hope people like my book.”. Well Mikel, I really liked your book! So congrats, you’ve achieved that with this reader.