From the Black Hills
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A decent, ordinary life jeopardized by a catastrophically extraordinary event: this is the story, mythic in its outline and substance, that Judy Troy--author of two New York Times Notable Books and Whiting award winner--tells in From the Black Hills.
In Wheatley, South Dakota, during the summer before Mike Newlin is to begin college, his father, an insurance salesman, shoots and kills the young woman who works for him as his receptionist. He disappears, and Mike is left behind in shock and grief. With his future suddenly obscured, Mike finds himself nearly overwhelmed by his present circumstances--not only the emotional damage inflicted by his father's awful crime but also his mother's dismay, the insinuating methods of a criminal investigator named Tom DeWitt, his girlfriend's anxieties, and his longing for an older woman who lives nearby--and the question of whether he will ever see his father again and what will happen if he does.
As imposing as the landscape that forms its setting, From the Black Hills conveys with compassionate power the drama of a young man who must try to overcome his father's dark legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Narrowing her canvas from the mix of sassy, lovelorn protagonists in the praised West of Venus, but deepening her character portrayal and atmospheric mood, Troy has written a restrained but powerful coming-of-age story distinguished by a remarkable empathy for ordinary people caught in the crosshairs of tragedy. During the hot summer before Mike Newlin is to leave for college, his father, Glenn, a depressed social misfit and inadequate parent, kills his receptionist/lover and flees their small town of Wheatley, N.D. As she sensitively explores Mike's reaction to the event, Troy captures both the particular alienation of adolescence and Mike's own growing acknowledgment that he has inherited his father's defensive, untrusting, secretive personality. His feelings about his father's transgressive behavior are clouded by his own lust for Lee-Ann Schofield, the wife of the farm owner where he does chores, and his guilt in betraying his tender, vulnerable girlfriend, Donetta Rush. As his father's disappearance extends into the fall, Mike begins his freshman year at the university and falls into a classic depression. Troy plumbs Mike's emotional turmoil so deftly that the pace of this meditative novel never flags. Then she delivers another shock that adds adrenaline to the suspense of Glenn's eventual reappearance. By the time Mike sadly realizes that he must establish his own moral center, Troy has etched a memorable portrait of a family in crisis, a small town's reaction, and the classic human need for understanding and connection. Her main achievement, however, is to inhabit Mike so completely that his character flaws and emotional volatility are rendered with keen compassion. Moreover, each one of the supporting characters--from the conflicted Lee-Ann, who understands Mike all too well, to the poignantly openhearted Donetta, to Mike's bravely repressed mother, to the lonely detective who leads the search for Glenn, to a feral little woman who surfaces as Glenn's companion--is drawn with a tolerance for human frailty. Like the Black Hills that represent the comfort of home to Mike, the novel encircles the reader in a believable world. Author tour.
