Back Roads

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. J.D. Salinger

I won’t tell you too much about this story. I want you to read it. I want it to leave an impression with you.

I will tell you how it affected me. This book elicited one of the strongest emotional responses I’ve ever experienced while reading a book.

The story is that of Harley, a boy of nineteen. His mother has recently been thrown into prison, convicted of murdering his abusive father; leaving him, a young man of nineteen, to parent his three younger sisters. He does the best he can. He’s angry, of course. Harley is angry at his mother for leaving him in this predicament, he’s angry at his now-dead father for being the cause. He lives with bitterness as his daily companion.

He works, to support their little family; he is a good, if somewhat resentful, provider.  He tries to take care of his sisters, getting them to school, and dealing with their petty (as he sees them) issues and social injustices. But, he can’t support them emotionally; he doesn’t understand girls, and definitely not his own sisters.

He’s orphaned, barely an adult himself, and has been weighted down with the responsibilities of adult hood. It’s an extremely stressful time in his life. He resorts to drinking. He parks his truck out in the country, and drinks.

He stumbles around the countryside, exploring, looking for a way out that he knows is not there.

Then he falls in love with a neighbor. They collide with each other somewhat accidently, in a meadow.

She is a middle-aged married mother of two very young children. Tawni created a bittersweet female character: a sad woman, somewhat confident, happy to walk about in jeans and bare feet, with beautiful hazel hair, and green eyes.

They meet secretly and have picnics, and watch the stars. He sneaks into her house when her husband is gone. They talk. They drink.

When it dawned on me that Tawni was about to kill off my favorite character, I was so mad!

Angrily, I tossed the book in the back seat of the car. I left it there and didn’t pick it up for several weeks. Finally, wanting to know the ending, I did fish it out and finish reading it.

Some of the imagery is extremely graphic. I had to cringe and skip over some of it, because that’s not something I can handle. Tawni describes, sadly, the demise of my character, in grisly detail.

Undeniably, this is a story that stays with you for a long time. 

Back Roads, 2000, Tawni O'Dell 

This post is part of the 31 Days of Bibliophilia series.