Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Three generations feel the pull of the land in tiny Sharon Center, Iowa, yet for all the fecundity of the soil and the river, and the hooks-and-eyes of the small-town community, the Montgomerys do not flourish. Instead, mayhem and death seem to stalk them with irony and malevolence. Wilson, the town's reticent but kind grocer, lives contentedly enough with schoolteacher Della, and both are held spellbound by nature's beauty. Their son John seeks truth in his work as a mechanic, then marries a profoundly sensual woman and their son July feels safe on the axis between order and wildness. As the Montgomery saga slowly and dramatically unfurls and darkens, Rhodes is mesmerizing, his narrative style at once utterly natural and extraordinarily complex as he shifts points of view, inlays stories within stories, and brings July into the harsh light of the foreground in the wake of the shocking deaths that leave him alone and inconsolable. A 12-year-old boy without a safety net, he takes off, becoming a stowaway on the Rock Island Line and riding the rails all the way to Philadelphia. He quickly learns that the world is a violent place, and establishes a sanctuary deep underground along the subway tracks. In this by turns magical and scorching bildungsroman, Rhodes' hero rises from a resourceful street urchin with a faithful sidekick, a roughed-up cat named Butch, to a young man of promise, only to have his world shattered once again. But July has fallen in love with a painter, and she joins him on the Rock Island Line after he realizes that home is back in Iowa. But there is no escaping the death business. July's fate is noose-shaped, and no sense can be made of it. Rhodes writes with both symphonic grandeur and down-to-earth humility in this galvanizing novel of the quick, naked bones of survival. This is a descent into grief as resonant as James Agee's, an embrace of the heartland spirit as profound as Cather's and Marilynne Robinson's, a story that echoes Dreiser, Steinbeck, Gardner, and Bellow. An authentically great American novel wholly its own in its devastating splendor and despair, epic courage and stoicism.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
It's a mighty good road to ride if you don't mind a few bumps in a narrative which gets side-railed from time to time. Rough, but big as all Iowa where this starts out from -- a family saga of Wilson and Della Montgomery who arrive from nowhere to win the heart of Sharon Center's folks (minor characters pop in and out again) and then their son John the ""sensualist"" who wanders off one day to return with wife Sarah, a moaner of otherworldly sexiness. They're all ""very special"" people, each with his own strangeness -- so that all the while Rhodes' imagination seems to shuttle from magical realism, specters and all, to the stuff of Americana. July Montgomery is born after some hundred pages of family album, and the Rock Island Line gets under steam after all his kin have died on him and July's run away to become a Philadelphia paper boy who resides underneath the City Hall subway platform. Adventures -- and fateful deaths -- pile up on him, though July has withal the family fiber and their art of ""doing the unbelievable."" The novel -- David Rhodes' third -- runs wild with unrestrained talent. It catches you up in its momentum (and Rhodes' potential) even when it veers way out of coherence -- in a hurry, it seems, to see the whole wide world out of one window. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
