Review by Booklist Review
Set in 1988, Gritton's debut is told from the questionably reliable, distinctive perspective of Shelley Cooper, a construction worker in rural Colorado whose life is marked by bad decisions and awful luck. His young niece is terminally ill; he has recently lost his job after stealing from his boss, and his brother, Clay, with whom he has a complicated relationship, has recently been released from prison. Shelley longs to settle down with steady work, but he can only find dubious employment offered by Clay, who picks up right where he left off before he was caught, convicted, and incarcerated. Shelley hides behind colloquialisms and a pretense of ignorance in a flashback-filled telling of his story that leaves the reader curious as to the actual events. In this throwback to 1980s dirty realism and a novel reminiscent of Frank Bill's fiction, Gritton evokes a beautiful rural landscape and people struggling with the cards they've been dealt, creating a rollicking portrait of a compelling and complicated man who is the product of his choices as much as his circumstances.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a voice rough as a chainsaw blade and Midwestern as green bean casserole, debut author Gritton chronicles the trip-to-hell-and-back life of the troubled Shelley Cooper. After a fire ravages the mountains in the vicinity of Montgrand, Colo., and most of the construction work dries up, Shelley steals an air compressor from his boss and loses his job. He needs money, same as his weed-growing older brother, Clayton, and his sister, May, who is married to Shelley's best friend Mike. Clayton's wife, Nancy, has the same shaking sickness her mother had, and May and Mike's little daughter, Layla, has cancer: in short, these are folks "whose bad luck run longer than an interstate." Something deep and unnameable bothers Shelley; he cares an awful lot about Mike, though his discontent mostly seems like a mean streak to others. When Clay starts coming up with mystery money, Shelley becomes suspicious; his brother already spent five years in prison for dealing weed, and Shelley blames this calamity for their mother's death. Nevertheless, he agrees to deliver Clay's latest batch of marijuana to Houston, and what happens on this trip is both violently tragic and a twisted sort of redemption. Pitch perfect cadences sing from the mouths of Gritton's characters, and the author performs skilled loop-de-loops in and out of Shelley's memories. This auspicious debut marks Gritton as a storyteller to watch. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A series of shocking events, some instigated by the hapless protagonist, shakes up a Colorado family struggling to get by during the economic downturn of the late 1980s.Things start going south for construction worker Shelley Cooper after a sudden mountain fire consumes the house on which he and his best friend, Mike, were toiling. When his boss rightly suspects he had something to do with an air processor that went missing after the blaze, Shelley loses his job. In desperate financial straits, he agrees to drive a shipment of marijuana to Houston for his brother, Clay, an ex-con who grows his own. "Don't think for a second I was dumb enough to figure it would turn out right," says Shelley, who has the $50,000 payday stolen by a young prostitute he let into his motel room. In fact, nothing ever goes right for him, including his impromptu marriage to his sister's friend Syrena. We are in an alternate Sam Shepard universe in which the battling brothers are too worn down by failure to fight. Moving back and forth in time with extreme subtlety, Gritton erects a penetrating family history of love, loss, loyalty, and betrayal. It takes a great writer to make a character as reprehensible as Shelley not only sympathetic, but almost likable. In fact, Shelley is not so dumb. He wryly reflects on billboards that read "HE IS RISEN" in the face of disaster and tells us how holding $50,000 in cash "feels like a blind rage, like a wolf howling at the moon." How did Shelley became the man he is? In this brilliant debut novel, there are many bread crumbs leading us back to possible answers.An affecting, richly drawn, darkly humorous novel about grifting siblings, one worse than the other. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
