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Summary
Summary
A combat veteran returned from war, Thad Broom can't leave the hardened world of Afghanistan behind, nor can he forgive himself for what he saw there. His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them is Aiden McCall, loyal to both but unable to hold them together. Connected by bonds of circumstance and duty, friendship and love, these three lives are blown apart when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps. On a meth-fueled journey to nowhere, they will either find the grit to overcome the darkness or be consumed by it.
Author Notes
David Joy 's first novel, Where All Light Tends to Go , debuted to great acclaim and was named an Edgar finalist for Best First Novel. His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in Drafthorse , Smoky Mountain Living , Wilderness House Literary Review , Pisgah Review , and Flycatcher , and he is the author of the memoir Growing Gills- A Fly Fisherman's Journey . Joy lives in Webster, North Carolina.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Appalachia provides the evocative setting for this tale of a brutal world filled with violence and drugs from Edgar finalist Joy (Where All Light Tends to Go). After a tour in Afghanistan as a soldier, Thad Broom returns to North Carolina more damaged than when he left, unable to forgive or forget what he did there. With nowhere else to go, Thad settles in his dilapidated trailer down the mountain from his mother, April Trantham, who, he knows, has never loved him and is pursued by her own demons. Thad reestablishes an aimless life with his best friend, Aiden McCall, who at age 12 saw his father shoot his mother dead. The two friends suddenly have a windfall of drugs and cash after witnessing the accidental death of their drug dealer. But neither Todd nor Aiden is capable of climbing out of his self-imposed rural prison. Lyrical prose, realistic dialogue, and a story that illuminates the humanity of each character make this a standout. Author tour. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
If there's a trailer on the cover, someone's snorting meth inside, or cooking it or, here, making it via the shake 'n' bake method and proving the author didn't do his research by watching Breaking Bad. Joy (Where All Light Tends to Go, 2015) sets his second novel in the hills around Little Canada, North Carolina, among people and places he evidently knows well. Aiden and Thad are mid-20s ne'er-do-wells damaged by early tragedy and parental neglect: Aiden is out of chances and trying to flee, while Thad, psychically scarred by service in Afghanistan, seems willing to self-destruct right where he is. The plot focuses on some suddenly and horrifically acquired meth, cash, and pseudoephedrine, followed by a violent spiral of events incited by spectacularly bad decision-making. Joy neither condescends to his characters nor excuses them but simply depicts them amid the crushing poverty and natural beauty of their environment. With prose as lyrical as it is hard-edged, he captures men still pining for childhood and stunned to find themselves as grownups with blood on their hands. Joy is one to watch and read.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"THIS COUNTRY IS at war with Germany." With those chilling words from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, delivered over the airwaves on the morning of Sept. 3,1939, Britain plunges back into the darkness of another world war. The English stiffen their collective spine and rally, as they always do. "We're made of strong fabric, all of us," declares Maisie Dobbs in Jacqueline Winspear's new mystery, in this grave hour (Harper, $27.99). But the toll these fresh hostilities take on Maisie and her friends will be a severe test of their resolve, measured in more lives lost, more families torn apart and more shellshocked veterans returning home with "that look, that stare" in their eyes. Having once served honorably as a spy, Maisie is soon recruited by the Secret Service to investigate the assassination of a Belgian refugee, one of the 7,000 to 8,000 Belgians who remained in England after the war. Winspear expands this criminal investigation into a far-reaching look at the contributions of Belgian citizens to the previous conflict, including the efforts of the wives, mothers and sisters of resistance fighters. "The Germans couldn't believe old women could cause much trouble and only looked for the boys," one veteran recalls with some satisfaction. Meanwhile, England is preparing for the coming onslaught, which everyone predicts will be fought in the skies. Children are being evacuated to the countryside, and women are signing up for the Auxiliary Ambulance Service. And although people keep forgetting to carry their gas masks, most are careful to use blackout curtains. (Of course, some Britons might think they're showing their patriotism by trying to kill "enemy" dogs like German shepherds and dachshunds.) As time goes on, more and more refugees pour into England, and while Winspear maintains her focus on the volunteers and charitable organizations involved in their rescue and relocation, her portraits of individual evacuees like Anna, a homeless waif so traumatized she has stopped speaking, are enough to break your heart. "She takes all her things with her everywhere," Maisie's stepmother observes, "bundles everything into that little case and won't let it out of her sight." STEPHEN DOBYNS HASN'T Written a Charlie Bradshaw mystery in ages, so reading Saratoga payback (Blue Rider, $27) feels like returning for old home week. When no-good Mickey Martin turns up dead on Charlie's front sidewalk, the retired (and unlicensed) private eye has to sneak around Lt. Frank Hutchins of the Saratoga Police Department to investigate. He must also take time off from delivering the ransom money for Bengal Lancer, a stallion worth over a million bucks in stud fees, part of a vicious crime wave that has already cost some magnificent horses their heads. Retirement doesn't sit well with Charlie ("I've been reading and tinkering, and now I'm bored"). He'd much rather be buying a shotgun ("Its potency made up for Charlie's growing sense of decrepitude") or interviewing people like Bad Maud, a bartender at the Greasy Mattress biker bar. (Bad Maud used to be Good Maud, but that was a long time ago.) Charlie has lost none of his charm, nor Dobyns his wry wit, so consider this novel a rare gift. WHAT BETTER SETTING for a Gothic murder mystery than 19thcentury Edinburgh? Especially with "resurrection men" plundering the cemeteries and lady "undergraduettes" permitted to dissect cadavers at the university's famed medical school. Kaite Welsh relishes these surroundings in her pungent first book, THE WAGES OF SIN (Pegasus Crime, $25.95). Sarah Gilchrist is one of the few, brave women studying for medical degrees, but she blanches like a timid girl when she recognizes the corpse on her dissection table as Lucy Collins, a pregnant streetwalker she'd met at St. Giles's Infirmary for Women and Children, the charity clinic where she serves as a volunteer. Welsh makes sure to introduce a bit of romance into her story ("There was a spark to him, a sort of magnetism," Sarah says of her chemistry professor), but she's primarily interested in the political and social conditions of the period - especially the "completely unnecessary" hysterectomies; the young women disowned by their families after being raped; the rickets and whooping cough endured by slum children; and the phosphorus necrosis that destroys the faces of women working in match factories. Welcome to the medical profession, Miss Gilchrist. DAVID JOY'S BLEAKLY beautiful tales of the rapacious drug culture of the Appalachian mountain dwellers of Jackson County, N.C., have a dreadful consistency. Every day, it seems, there's "another story of another man killing another man in another godforsaken town." In THE WEIGHT OF THIS WORLD (Putnam, $27), a boy like Aiden McCall knows that "in time he would become his father" - a man who told his wife he loved her before shooting her in the head and killing himself. That alone should explain why Aiden would choose a brute like Thad Broom for his best friend, remaining loyal even when Thad returns from military service "malformed and hardened by bitterness and anger." Their friendship forms the spine of this gorgeously written but pitiless novel about a region blessed by nature but reduced to desolation and despair.
Library Journal Review
Aiden McCall was orphaned at age 12 when his father shot his mother, then killed himself. After Aiden bounces around among various orphanages in the mountains of western North Carolina, Thad Broom, Aiden's best friend, convinces his mom, April, to adopt Aiden. Years later, after many scrapes with the law as a result of the boys' drug use, Thad joins the U.S. Army to escape his hardscrabble, dysfunctional life, while Aiden's juvenile record keeps him at home with April. When Thad returns after his deployment in Afghanistan, he resumes his substance abuse to cope with the horrors he witnessed. Unfortunately, April cannot help her son, as she is dealing with her own demons. The trio find their lives forever transformed after Thad and Aiden witness the accidental death of their drug dealer. VERDICT Readers of Southern grit lit will enjoy Joy's excellent sophomore outing (after Where All the Light Tends To Go), which is both dark and violent. Ron Rash aficionados will appreciate Joy's strong sense of place in his vivid depiction of rural Appalachia. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]-Russell -Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.