Fourth of July Creek

by Smith Henderson

[jamiereadthis]

The real deal.

For 460 pages Henderson hustles and moves with this story, packs punches and surprises, lingers where he needs to linger and skips where he doesn’t. I was wary of this one. I’ll admit it: wary of the hype, wary of how much it sounded like it should be exactly my thing. Wary of how much energy it might take if I loved it— or worse, if I didn’t.

I love to be dead wrong. What did it turn out to be? Exactly my thing, no “should” or “maybe” about it. Pete Snow. The Pearls. Mary and Cecil and Katie and even Rachel or Rose. They didn’t sap my energy; they gave me energy. Sometimes a book is just good.

And if this one’s got a trajectory you could draw on paper, that line would curl and wander, and loop back on itself, and race ahead, but in elevation it would look like the line drawn east up the west face of a mountain. Straight uphill. I thought I had the ending pegged down and once again: dead wrong. The fifth star was earned in the last fifty pages.

Not to make you wary like I was with the praise, but: highly recommended. Sometimes a book does just what it needs to do.