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Summary: What a story!!!!!!
Review: Such a sad story, but a story everyone should read just to make us all think. Abused children that have seen too much with their young eyes and have felt so much sadness in their hearts that they are toughened young hearts. I could not put this book down when I started reading it. I've heard people refer to a book as "a page turner"...........well, this book is definitely a page turner!!
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Summary: Awesome!
Review: I darn near stayed up all night trying to finish, but had to sneak and finish it at my desk this morning. If I could have rated it 5000, I would have.
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Summary: Gotta Love this book!
Review: This book could tell alot about some boys out there that some of us have dated, married, witnessed, or even gave birth to. It tells a story that probably happens in America each year. But it really puts you on a roller coaster, hating one character then realizing you should love them. It was very revelating!! I LOVED THIS BOOK!! (And I have sent my copy to friends and loved ones across the country!)
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Summary: Enchanting Depression
Review: Life for Harley Altmeyer starts at the bottom of the social ladder, and doesn't go anywhere but down.Tawni O'Dell weaves a fabulous tale of lower-class white America, with such feeling and heart that it is hard not to at times sympathize with young Harley, who is on the verge of manhood in more ways than just physical age. You want things to get better for Harley; you want him to find closure; you want to see him freed from his emotional and societal prisons. O'Dell creates such a strong characterization of Harley that one can perceive his situation as though the reader WAS Harley. Struggling to be the head of his household, Harley holds down two minimum-wage jobs, and still barely keeps his family above water. On top of the financial pressures of life, he must also be father/brother to his three sisters; their mother is serving out a life sentence in prison for murdering their father...who by all accounts was a hard, cold man who harshly disciplined his children. O'Dell shows the cycle of pain that so often afflicts generations of families, and how difficult it is to break that cycle. Harley, no matter how hard he tries, cannot escape the fate that lies before him. He has the will, he has the opportunity, yet his path is blocked at every turn by circumstances beyond his control. His very future is driven by his past, and as has been observed by many wise sages, "History repeats itself". Back Roads is a sublime tale, wonderfully written, although very depressing. There are no easy answers for Harley, though they seem very plain to the readers. Harley must balance the consequences for himself...and for this, he redeems himself and those around him by not choosing the easy way out or making excuses. This book is not a "feel-good" story about Americana, but it definitely expresses an America we know all too well. Peace Out.
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Summary: A book that grabs you and leaves you begging for more!
Review: I found this book to be so captivating I was reading it (or trying to) in the dark as we drove across South Dakota. I will have to say that it was slow in the first chapter but once it grabbed me it just wouldn't let go. Her characters were so "real" you just couldn't help but feel for them and want more than what life had dealt them. Harley tries so hard to make life better for himself and his sisters. The twists and turns are sharp, and they make you gasp out loud. I highly recommend this book!! Tawni O'Dell is a writer to be watched and read! I look forward to reading more from her in the future!
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Summary: Dream Assaults on a Slippery Slope
Review: What a slippery demarcation between reality and non-reality exists in this surprising book! That old classic conflict of good vs. evil is equally as elusive... i.e. who IS the good guy anyway?? Of course, Harley can't dream when he's asleep. He's kept busy picking himself up from the constant dream assaults that occur when he's awake. The reader frequently has to reassess her perspective, as more and more of the events Harley struggles with, push their way up from the unthinkable to the probable. This book is hard to put down and you have to love that the author has this wonderful name, maybe a name that a traumatized 20 year old boy would select.
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Summary: You Can't Put It Down
Review: This book takes you to a place you have never been and you can't escape! You have to know what happens next - I read the whole book straight through barely taking time to eat and acknowledge my family! I thought Tawni O'Dell did an incredible job of letting us get to know and care about these characters - you are screaming out loud at them by the end of the book!
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Summary: Back Roads
Review: The only reason I haven't given Back Roads five stars is because of the language used and violence. I wasn't sure I'd even be able to read it, but I'm very glad I did. Once you realize that the subject matter, although shocking, is actually handled in a way that is in favor of the very best of morals, you can gain an understanding of those in very difficult circumstances. I really hope that there will be a sequel. I also hope that there will be a movie! (If there is, I have just the theme song for it. I had written it before I heard of the book, but it fits well.) The characters of the book have become like well-known acquaintances. I especially like Harley. I hope things turn out better for him in the next book.
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Summary: A Great Start, but a Disappointing Finish
Review: This book has a terrific beginning. We meet Harley, a 19 year old young man forced by circumstances to care for his three younger sisters. Their lives are difficult. His mom is in prison for murdering his child-beating dad, Harley works two jobs, his best friend has left for college and he really doesn't know how to raise his two younger sisters or how to handle his wild, 16 year old sister. It's a great story and I really enjoyed reading it. Harley becomes involved with the 33 year old mom of one of his sister's playmates. All of a sudden, though in the middle of the novel, the plot starts taking all of these preposterous twists and turns which I found totally unbelievable and, frankly, unnecessary. Ms. O'Dell is a terrific writer and could have relied on the simple story she was telling, without going for the shock value of these plot twists. Despite these far-fetched twists, her writing drove me to read on and kept me up late reading. Ms. O'Dell clearly has a lot of talent and I will definitely read her next work. I only hope she has the confidence to rely on her writing and story-telling skills, and avoid those silly plot twists.
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Summary: Shameless emotional manipulation
Review: Tawni O'Dell, Back Roads (Viking, 2000)
availability: every store in America probably still has two or three hundred copies I find the whole thing incredibly amusing. Had a man written this book, word for word, the character of Harley Altmeyer would no doubt be blazoned on the front as "an unstoppable sociopath about to explode" (fill in the correct number of exclamation points, depending on era and author). Instead, the back cover blurb calls him "wonderfully touching." Oh, please. Thank heaven Tawni O'Dell is a much better writer than her blurbist, because Harley Altmeyer is the least likable hero I've run across since Michael Moorcock decided an anorexic albino with a big black sword sounded like a good idea. Note I didn't say antihero there; Harley Altmeyer is certainly the hero of this book in that, while O'Dell keeps him so unlikable he gets nauseating at times, we never stop feeling sympathy for him. Altmeyer is on the brink of his twentieth birthday, and as we open he's sitting in the box in the local police station being grilled by three cops for killing his girlfriend-- who just happens to be the thirty-four-year-old wife of the next-door neighbor. Not terribly surprising, the cops muse, given his roots; Harley's mother was convicted of killing his father a couple years previous, and is now sitting in prison in Indiana, PA (I point this out because for the first hundred fifty pages I wondered how they could drive from Pennsylvania to Indiana in two hours-- and I spent over half my life living less than an hour from Indiana, PA. Obviously a truly memorable place). Harley spends about two hundred fifty pages spinning out his tale, and it's a doozy. After his mom iced his dad, he was dead and she was in jail, and the task of raising his three younger sisters fell squarely on his shoulders. Nineteen, saddled with all the bills, working two jobs, and having to raise three sisters, ranging in age from six to sixteen. It's not exactly a Frank Capra film. And Harley, whose love/hate relationship with all women borders on the psychotic, is in no way going to be mistaken for Jimmy Stewart (actually, I saw Giovanni Ribisi, circa his memorable X-Files appearance, playing this guy). If you've got half a brain and have read enough books along these lines, you've probably got half of it figured before you open the front cover. But O'Dell's writing is so thoroughly disingenuous, and Harley (the very essence of the unreliable narrator!) is so straightforward and quasi-logical that he's completely believable. And so, despite the general predictability of the plot points, they still hit with a roundhouse. The tendency, of course, is to compare this with the other novels in the Oprah stable, but it pulls me in a different direction; there's more here that invites comparison with Ian McEwan's weepingly good first novel, The Cement Garden (and not just the overall plot, either). While McEwan has turned into something of a washed-out pansy since he hit us over the head with that particular cement block, I still have high hopes for O'Dell. This is stark, simple, minimal, easy to read, compelling, with some of the strongest characterization I've come across in years, and somehow the revelations that just kind of wander through the last fifty pages (no big emotional revelatory scenes here) still manage to surprise, not to mention tug at the heartstrings. Oprah found a good'un here, that's for sure. Let's just hope O'Dell doesn't end up a washed-out pansy who moves to England for the sole purpose of getting short-listed for the Booker Prize. *** 1/2
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