taken from Goodreads:
"In his timely YA debut, a best-selling novelist revisits a
summer of tumult and truth for a young narrator and his war-torn family.
Bicentennial fireworks burn the sky. Bob Seger growls from a transistor radio. And down by the river, girls line up on lawn chairs in pursuit of the perfect tan. Yet for ten-year-old Eli Book, the summer of 1976 is the one that threatened to tear his family apart. There is his distant mother; his traumatized Vietnam vet dad; his wild sister; his former warprotester aunt; and his tough yet troubled best friend, Edie, the only person with whom he can be himself. As tempers flare and his father’s nightmares rage, Eli watches from the sidelines, but soon even he cannot escape the current of conflict. From Silas House comes a tender look at the complexities of childhood and the realities of war — a quintessentially Southern novel filled with music, nostalgic detail, a deep respect for nature, and a powerful sense of place."
I've heard Eastern Kentucky author Silas House read from his novels and answer questions twice; both times I've been completely enamored with him (the attitude, the accent...he's just adorable -- and would likely cringe if he ever read those words). He's another author whose work (much like Wendell Berry's) is heavily imbued with a sense of time and place, but still has a timeless appeal.
And for me, that timeless quality is just one of the many things that catapults this book to the top of my 2010 Great Reads list. This may easily end up being the best book I read all year. I will admit, though, that my affinity for this book is based on just how much of my own childhood, in both general and specific ways, I saw in this novel; I'm not sure I can express just how strongly I identified with it.
Much of the novel's content, I assume, is autobiographical. I've heard House speak about growing up in Eastern Kentucky, and I've heard him talk about his own development as a writer, so it's pretty safe to assume that the driving force (if not the specific details) behind this novel are pulled from his own experiences. But that's the beauty of it, too -- that even with a very specific setting and plot events, House's book captures the magic of summer on the cusp of adolescence in a way that will tug at the heartstrings of anyone who grew up in a small rural town during the 70s.
There's so much to applaud here -- fully-developed characters that are rich in detail and realistically flawed, prose that evokes nostalgia without falling prey to sentimentality, and a story that can hold the attention of both young and old. That, for me, is the kicker. House doesn't work off the assumption that because it's YA fiction, then it's somehow easier to write or "less" than adult fiction. This story is just as full and rich and deep and probing as any of his adult novels, and telling the story from Eli's point of view adds a poignancy to it that would be lacking had any of the other characters been responsible for the telling.
