Review by Booklist Review
Hester is a highly compensated Manhattan attorney with a slick car and snazzy condo. She also has terminal breast cancer and a lifelong desire to kill her estranged father, who left her now-deceased mother when Hester was a child. Taking only a few clothes, her mother's ashes, and a gun, Hester, with a vague murder-suicide scheme percolating in the back of her mind, leaves her job and home behind and heads west to California, where her artist father now lives. In true picaresque fashion, Courage's prickly heroine has escapades en route--a sexual encounter with her ex-lover, an awkward dinner with a former best friend, a stolen car, and myriad breakdowns. Accompanying her is John, a hitchhiking ecowarrior Hester picks up along the way, who comes burdened with quests and ghosts of his own. As the duo makes their way cross-country, their separate missions diffuse with a contemplative murkiness. Courage's atmospheric debut novel crackles with refreshing honesty, disarming cynicism, and evocative staying power.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Courage debuts with the devilishly alluring tale of a terminally ill New Yorker who embarks on a road trip to kill her abusive and long-estranged father. Hester, a high-paid corporate lawyer, has just turned 40 when she receives a breast cancer diagnosis and is told she has six months to live. Following a sleepless night, she reflects on how she was "always going to kill my father," ever since she was 13 and her parents separated. An artist, he now lives in Death Valley, Calif., with his new wife. After hitting the road, Hester picks up a hitchhiker named John, whose punk attire reminds her of her college boyfriend, prompting her to pay a visit to him in Pittsburgh. Hester's memories and her cross-country progress meld into a hazy dream logic, and she wonders if John, a photographer documenting Superfund sites, is merely a "figment," though she sees him again after crossing Indiana, and agrees to drive him to a former ammunition factory. Along the way, she reflects on her polluter clients' quiet settlements with the EPA. The layered narrative grows intriguingly complex as Hester approaches her destination. Readers will find this a surprisingly moving portrait of a deeply wounded woman. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Since Homer penned The Odyssey, the hero's journey has been a staple literary device. Heroes endure challenges that test their mettle and enlarge them as people. So it is with Hester, who, after receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer, embarks on a journey across the U.S. to exact vengeance on her father. She's determined to murder him as payback for all the damage he inflicted on her and her mother. But something happens along the way. Hester, who has always been a cynical loner, develops a deep relationship, approaching affection, for a young hitchhiker named John, a determined environmental activist who takes Hester on a zigzag tour of Superfund sites throughout the country. Though Hester's story ends with her realizing too late what her adamant cynicism has kept from her, the happy thing for readers is the novel itself. VERDICT Courage (editor at the literary magazine Agni) has created a compelling, nonstop reading experience that pulls readers relentlessly forward as Hester is slowly transformed. Written with dry humor, bilious sarcasm, and startlingly vivid imagery, this debut takes its place among American picaresque novels such as Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.--Michael F. Russo
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
This tightly wound novel follows a terminally ill woman on a quest to take vengeance against her long-absent father. Hester, a corporate attorney in Manhattan, prides herself on her lack of emotional needs and connections, although she does like sex with strangers if they're creepy enough. On the verge of turning 40, she discovers she has aggressive breast cancer and will die in six months unless she gets treatment. Instead, she quits her job and begins a cross-country drive to the California home of her father, an artist whom she last saw when she was 18, shortly after her mother's death. Cancer aside, Hester is an emotionally damaged character, almost cringeworthy in her alienation from normal human feelings. Drawn with knife-sharp prose, she is a woman choosing to close herself off. Her travel plan is simple: "Drive west, find Dad, kill Dad, then self." She claims that she's wanted to kill her father since her parents' divorce when she was 13. There's a history of violence involved that Hester never allows to come fully into focus. Of course, her plans go awry in small and large ways. When her car is stolen, she can afford a rental; when visiting people from her past proves unnerving, she can escape. But what ultimately succeeds in throwing Hester's equilibrium off balance is the bond she forms with a hitchhiker. John is an activist whose cause is "the dying world," and Hester begins taking detours so he can photograph Superfund sites while fending off brushes with the law. Still in his early 20s, John is an idealistic extremist but also a character of profound integrity who cares deeply about both issues and people. Without being sexual, Hester and John's relationship changes Hester--and the novel--for the better, weakening her self-protective solipsism while broadening her outlook to consider the world beyond her problems. What starts as a bitter internal dialogue becomes a rich overlap of the personal and the political. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
