East of Denver

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Synopsis
Mixing pathos and humor in equal measure, East of Denver is an unflinching novel of rural America, a poignant, darkly funny tale about a father and son finding their way together as their home and livelihood inexorably disappears. When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams arrives at his family’s farm in eastern Colorado to bury a dead cat, he finds his widowed and senile father, Emmett living in squalor. He has no money, the land is fallow, and a local banker has cheated his father out of the majority of the farm equipment and his beloved Cessna. With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare suddenly finds himself caretaker to both his dad and the farm, and drawn into an unlikely clique of old high school classmates: Vaughn Atkins, a paraplegic confined to his mother’s basement; Carissa McPhail, an overweight bank teller who pitches for the local softball team; and longtime bully D. J. Beckman, who now deals drugs throughout small-town Dorsey. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot with his father and his fellow gang of misfits to rob the very bank that has stolen their future. East of Denver is a remarkably assured, sharply observed, and utterly memorable debut. .
Copyright:
2012

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9781101548691
Publisher:
Penguin Group, USA
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Gregory Hill
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Literature and Fiction
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

4 out of 5

By on

After the first two chapters, I was afraid I had gotten into another one of those awful prodigal-Gen-X books. You know the kind: thirty-something main character returns to hometown to confront the failure of his/her life. But East of Denver not only has an actual plot, but ended up being pretty funny besides. Stacey "Shakes" Williams returns to his dusty, almost-withered-away hometown on the Colorado plains and finds his father suffering from early-onset dementia, and the woman who looked after him locked in the bathroom, dead for two weeks. So he stays to take care of his beloved Pa. In the process, he reconnects with what few high-school friends are left in town: a bitter paraplegic who lives as a virtual prisoner in his mom's basement; an obese anorexic bank teller; a loudmouth drug dealer. But mostly, he stays on what's left of the family farm, exploring his agrarian roots. In his day, Pa was something of a mechanical genius, and still has surprising flashes of his former can-do self, but will just as quickly forget whathe's doing, wander off and get lost. Shakes and his friends hatch a harebrained scheme to rob the local bank, to get both money and revenge on the bank's owner, who has been ripping Pa off. The idea never gets off the ground though, and things seem to be irrevocably heading downhill. You're just waiting for some kind of climax, and when it finally comes, it's dumb. I thoroughly enjoyed the first twenty-five chapters of this book, but the last one was both implausible and unsatisfactory, leaving the reader up in the air both literally and figuratively. Hate when that happens!