In ‘Later Days,’ Chip Jacobs draws on Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge’s past

From Larry Wilson of the Southern California News Group: 

Not a few novels set in Southern California feel local to natives and longtime residents. They try, and sometimes succeed, to capture the feeling of “L.A.” (“The Big Sleep,” “Play It as It Lays”). Other novels are what city editors used to call “local-local” stories – Naomi Hirahara’s “Summer of the Big Bachi” set in Altadena and other Japanese American neighborhoods of the Southland, Kem Nunn’s surf-noir “Huntington Beach.”

But in his second novel set in Pasadena and adjacent La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena author Chip Jacobs goes what newsroom sages called “local-local-local” – there and (almost) only there, deep in the weeds of one particular small part of our neck of the woods.

“Arroyo” of 2019 was a mostly historical, though occasionally time-traveling, novel surrounding the legends past and present created by the 112-year-old, 1,500-foot Colorado Street Bridge – “Suicide Bridge,” as it sometimes was and is known.

“Later Days,” published Sept. 16 by L.A. literary press Rare Bird Books, is of a particular time – the late 1970s and early 1980s – and a particular place, an elite Flintridge prep school transitioning from an all-boys, jock-centric campus to a co-ed one.

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