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Book Reviews Title Back
Roads Fiction-Net
Rating Buy It
From Amazon.co.uk - BUY
NOW! Cover
Story One day Harley
Altmyer was 18 and thinking about making some kind
of life. He had a family he loved and he figured it
was time to get a job. Before he has the chance,
his life is a minefield: his father is dead, his
mother is in prison for murder, three younger
sisters to care for, and there's not too much time
left over for himself. Suddenly he has two crummy
jobs, a fantasy sex life, big worries about the
kids and a court-appointed therapist. An intense
physical relationship with a woman living down the
road seems to offer a way out, the answer to his
problems. But little can he realise that those
problems are only just beginning... We
Say Back Roads,
according to the sleeve, was a New York Times
Bestseller, chosen to be part of Oprah Winfrey's
'Book Club Selection' and has a list of accolades
from US newspaper reviews as long as your arm. So
this novel just has to be a page turner? Well yes,
but no. What?! Well, let me try and
explain. The pages do turn
easily. Its written extremely well, it has a
powerful story, it has engaging characters. There
has to be a but coming doesn't there?! BUT it is so
desolate and depressing. I hoped against hope that
things would start getting better for the family
that O'Dell writes about. It never did. I could
imagine them on Oprah recounting their awful tale
and the audience going oooh! and shaking their
heads in disgust that such terrible things had been
allowed to happen. Am I a cynic? Probably, but no
matter how awful the story got I kept thinking
something good might still happen to them.
Unfortunately O'Dell doesn't go for the easy option
of the happy ending and I just wish she
had….it would have made wading through all the
bleakness seem worth it. Our narrator is
Harley, at eighteen years old the eldest child of
the family. He talks to the reader about himself,
his mom, his dad, and three sisters. As the story
begins, we learn that Harley's mother apparently
shoots his father because of the physical abuse he
doles out daily to the four children. His mother is
jailed for the crime and Harley has to take on the
arduous task of looking after himself and three
sisters with very little help from anyone. Here we
discover what Harley feels as he visits his mother
for the first time in prison. "She lightly
kissed the top of Jody's head again and then gently
grazed her cheek across it. This was the gravy part
of motherhood. She still got it even though she no
longer had to deal with the bad stuff. The fights.
The bills. The spills. The nightmares. The
questions. The future. She still had us kids but we
didn't have her." Harley's style
has its moments of humour but they are black. The
only light relief for me was provided the youngest
member of the Altmyer family, Jody. She seems, not
surprisingly with what is directed at the rest of
the kids, the only one that has some form of handle
on rationality. She delights with her lists of
things to do. "Feed Dinusors, Eat Brekfist, Brush
Teeth, Fold Londree, Moe Yard." She keeps all of
the fortune cookie sayings believing Confucius
writes them and they are wise words telling her
what to do. Her speech is extremely believable as
the dialogue of a four year old. Here Harley asks
her about a previous conversation they
had; "Did you tell
Misty what we talked about the other night on the
porch?" "What did we talk
about?" "Did you tell her
you told me she was home the night Mom and Dad had
their big fight? "She knows she
was home?" "That's not what
I mean. Did you tell her you told me?" "No. Do you want
me to?" "No I don't want
you to." "Why
not?" "Just
don't" "What if she asks
me?" "Why would she
ask you?" "You asked
me" "Just don't talk
to her at all" "Why
not?" Mostly O'Dell's
writing convinces that she is in the mind of an
eighteen year old male having to deal with the
tribulations of parenthood while he is still not an
adult himself. We are taken on a roller-coaster
ride with Harley as he grows from boy to manhood.
We read about his first emotional and sexual
experiences with an older woman whilst trying to
hold down two mundane low-paid jobs and keep
appointments with Betty his psychiatrist (who has
'her real office someplace else'). During all this
he tries to look after his three younger
traumatised sisters whilst attempting to cope with
his own confused thoughts and feelings. Sometimes
these moments of soliloquy from Harley shock with
the violent nature of the ideals he has grown up
with. Occasionally we
remember the author is female, perhaps with bitter
experiences at the hands of males, and Harley is
her fictional character. "It didn't matter if I
loved her. From what I had seen of marriage, the
woman had to love the man but the man only had to
love what the woman did for him." So would I
recommend this book? Well overall, I can't actually
say I liked it at all but I think I still respected
it in the morning! Perhaps I found it is so
disheartening because it is a tale that could be so
very real for some. Review by: Susan
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