Despite all the Neil Young references, this novel is well worth reading. A coming of age novel that’s part southern gothic and part mystery, Tarkington’s debut has flown under the radar, but I am very happy to keep recommending it.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

How much weight can the dysfunctional family cast on you? Is there even a way out?

Spencerville, Virginia has their secrets. Under the cover of righteousness, the anger, hate and any other dysfunctions are going on - yet one needs time and knowledge and life experience to recognize all the dark, hurting stuff going on. How do you recognize the desperate revolt in your own brother, whom you love like a hero? How do you know how the need to look proper can destroy a girl´s health? What is burning down there under the surface of so-called proper people?

Young Rocky is too young child to understand, but 7 years later, as a teenager himself, he can start to see the acts and the reasons for them. Yet some things are unstoppable.

This is a dark, heavy book. Imagine the book written with a theater play in mind - but in the theater the acting and the scene help to build the understanding, which is missing in the book.
The literary style is very good, yet the message stays unclear. As if the atmosphere, emotions and maybe intuition were more important than the whos and whys and wheres and the other questions which should be asked and understood. Which has a merit, I guess - but here I would like not to leave the red herrings (the whys of the different parental cruelty/negligent) for the last chapters. The catharsis would be more cathartic, so to say, and one can build the relationships with the characters. This way the unclear, only felt darkness was too heavy for me to be willing to invest myself emotionally.

A debut coming-of-age story set in Virginia in the 1970s, with a murder mystery on the side. Rocky is an eight-year-old boy who idolizes his sixteen-year-old brother Paul in the first part of the book, and the story continues into Rocky's teen years. I can't say much more without giving away the plot, but the audiobook effectively conveys a mixture of nostalgia and melancholy with Gothic undertones. It might pair well with M. O. Walsh's My Sunshine Away, a coming-of-age story set in Louisiana in the 1980s.

I'm in the box of shame again...



Most of my friends loved this book. I really just did not read it right...because I hated it.