book has so much happening so fast that I need to take periodic breaks from it or I will be overwhelmed.
This is one my all time favorite books! Its packed full of action, adventure amp has quirky southern characters that will make you laugh.
I found it to be a fast paced page turner, Like a whacked out adult version of Huckleberry Finn, A fun read. In the waning days of one of the most unrecognized American exoduses of the twentiethcentury, millions of broken people have left the strip mines of Appalachia in search of better things.
In, two of these yearning soulsDahlia Jean Coker, the teenage daughter of a sluttish mother and a deadbeat Daddy, and "Twitch," an excon descended from the legendary outlaw Younger clanare looking for their own ways out.
After a botched robbery by Twitch, Dahlia takes the leadwith Twitch's loot and his teenage sonwhile the old man gives chase, with revenge in his heart and Dahlia's mother by his side.
Through the South, and finally on to a Key West reeling from the Bay of Pigs debacle, the chase is at once thrilling, heartbreaking, murderous, dark, and hilarious.
Along the way, readers encounter a snakehandling evangelist, determined civil rights activists, equally determined Klansmen, and the unfortunate wife of an adulterous NASA scientist.
Battling a Tennessee flood of biblical proportions and a looming Florida hurricane, Dahlia, Twitch, and their improbable traveling companions all land up at Dahlia's daddy's houseboat.
The final showdown, with a fortune and dreams of a better life at stake, will have readers marveling.
This book is very similar to a number of Michael Malone books what with the epic quests, the myriad of eccentric characters, and epiphanies at the end of the journey.
However, this book is more thoughtful and solidly written than Malone's more whimsical style and plot lines.
Still, I can't give this book more than three because the author runs out of steam just before the ending and while the finale is appropriate, by the time you get there you just feel like shrugging and closing the book because all of the best parts have already been so vividly experienced.
Joe Jackson is mainly known for his nonfiction which is why a number of his characters are so beautifully real despite the outlandish plot twists.
I highly recommend him if you'd like to immerse yourself in a Southern, Gothic yarn that will make you want to relive the more exquisite parts of your youth, fear the bitterness and cycnism that lays ahead if you're not careful, and help you scratch that itch of wanderlust.
Joe Jackson is the author of seven works of nonfiction and a novel, His nonfiction includes: Leavenworth Train, a finalist for theEdgar Award for Best Fact Crime Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America, with co author William F.
Burke and an introduction by William Styron A Furnace Afloat: The Wreck of the Hornet and the Harrowing,mile of its Survivors A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, one of Time magazines Top Ten Books ofand Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic, released by Farrar, Straus Giroux in May.
A first n Joe Jackson is the author of seven works of nonfiction and a novel.
His nonfiction includes: Leavenworth Train, a finalist for theEdgar Award for Best Fact Crime Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America, with co author William F.
Burke and an introduction by William Styron A Furnace Afloat: The Wreck of the Hornet and the Harrowing,mile of its Survivors
A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, one of Time magazine's Top Ten Books ofand Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic, released by Farrar, Straus Giroux in May.
A first novel, How I Left the Great State of Tennessee and Went on to Better Things, was released in March.
His seventh work of nonfiction Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary was released by Farrar, Straus Giroux in Octoberit chronicles the life of Oglala Lakota holy man Black Elk, best known for hisBlack Elk Speaks, written in collaboration with the Nebraska poet laureate John Neihardt.
Jackson's biography received the following honors and awards in: Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Best Biography of, True West magazine Winner of the Western Writers of AmericaSpur Award, Best Western Biography Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and One of the Best Books of, The Boston Globe.
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