The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

The World Made Straight Reviews

• 
  Kelly (and the Book Boar)

  Find all of my reviews at:
  http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
  
  As Imagine Dragons said . . . . .
  
  
  
  
  If you follow me, you’ll know that earlier this month I read a book that made tears squirt out my own face and how unacceptable that was for me. Miracle of all miracles had this cover pop up right when I needed it most . . . . .
  
  
  
  
  I mean, has there ever been a more perfect creation for a Kelly/Mitchell surefire success? I don’t think so. Between the cover, the fact it was written by Ron Rash and the thumbs up from my literary dream man David Joy, there was zero chance I was going to pass this up. And the plot????? Well, ol’ boy Travis is out fishing for some speckleds in order to cover his gas and insurance after getting fired from the local grocery store when he comes across a potential windfall over on the Toomey property . . . .
  
  
  
  
  And he knows just the fella who can help take it off his hands . . . .
  
  “Where’d you get that?” Leonard asked.
  
  “Found it,” Travis said.
  
  “Found it, did you. And you figured finders keepers.”
  
  “Yeah.”
  
  Resulting in a most unlikely friendship as the story progresses . . . .
  
  
  
  
  As the blurb says, this is a story that is “harrowing yet ultimately hopeful” and it gets all the Starzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
  
• 
  Marianne

  “… he sat on the steps as morning made its slow lean into the valley – sunlight grabbing hold of the treetops and sliding down the sycamore and birch trunks, which threw the light back, almost a reflection. Then the sun eased into the pasture, a slow unfurling that lit up dew beads on the grass and the spider webs. A pair of goldfinches flashed across the meadow like yellow sparks flung out from the morning’s bright becoming”
  
  The World Made Straight is the third novel by award-winning American author, Ron Rash. Having quit school due to boredom rather than stupidity, 17-year-old Travis Shelton helps his father in the tobacco fields. Looking for a better fishing spot during his free time, he stumbles across a field of marijuana plants. Taking what he can manage to carry, he confers with his buddy Shank, and ends up selling it to the local drug dealer, ex-high school teacher, Leonard Shuler.
  
  Some unwise decisions later, Travis is recovering in hospital when a candy striper, a girl from his homeroom class, walks in. Quietly determined, Lori Triplett intends to rise above her station and become a nursing assistant. She can see that Travis has the capacity to be more than a tobacco farmer and sets higher sights for them both.
  
  Despite his lifestyle and his source of income, Leonard Shuler finds himself giving shelter to two misfits: Dena is a 34-year-old drug addict; Travis has fallen out with his father and needs a place to stay. Leonard and Lori have a subtle but profound effect on the direction of his life, one for which Travis is sometimes grateful and at other times resentful. Travis abandons his drinking buddies in favour of studying for his GED. Will he be able to make something of his life?
  
  Rash constructs his story using Leonard and Travis as narrators, and adding a historical aspect with entries from the 19th century Ledger of Dr Joshua Candler. The field where the 1863 Shelton Laurel Massacre (an actual event) took place plays a significant role. Rash’s characters are well developed and he is easily able to make the reader care about their fate, hope for their future, be disappointed in their poor choices and applaud their courageous acts.
  
  As always, Rash’s descriptive prose is achingly beautiful, and his love for the Appalachia and her people is apparent in every paragraph. Ron Rash has yet to disappoint: his books are an utter joy to read.
  
  A few examples of Rash’s wonderful prose:
  “A woodshed concealed the marijuana from anyone at the farmhouse or the dirt drive that petered out at the porch steps. Animal hides stalled mid-climb on the shed’s graying boards. Coon and fox, in the centre a bear, their limbs spread as though even in death they were still trying to escape. Nailed up there like a warning, Travis thought”
  
  “It seemed as if the coal-dark core of the mountains flowed out on nights like this, rose all the way up to the floor of the sky”
  
  “The last rind of sun embered on Brushy Mountain. Cicadas had started their racket in the trees and lightning bugs rode an invisible current over the grass”
  
  “The boy’s face was all jut and angle, as though the features had been outlined but not yet filled in. a lanky build but strength in the shoulders and arms, the muscles wiry and tough like wisteria vines”
  
  “Even if he’d never heard the song before, Leonard would have known it was Cash. No one else had a voice like that, smooth and rough at the same time, like water flowing over gravel”
  
  “The sun fell full upon them, a soft warming that made the whole meadow drowsy, the jorees silent, a big yellow and black writing spider motionless in its web. No hint of a breeze, as if even the wind had lain down for a nap. The cloudless sky like a painting too, its color a light but also denser blue. Cerulean, he thought, remembering the word he’d read last week, one he’d asked Leonard to pronounce for him”
• 
  Donna

  
  The World Made Straight is the fourth
  Ron Rash novel I have read, and like the others, I rated it 5 stars. Mr. Rash's writing is consistently superb, his words perfect in their ability to evoke images and feeling. There is a heavy layer of darkness in his novels, but his writing makes the darkness beautiful and seductive, not in a way that glorifies the bad, but in a way that shows how spare is the line between happiness and pain, between goodness and evil. I'm sure I'll be reading the rest of Ron Rash's works, and I look forward to it.
• 
  sappho_reader

  Just before starting this I read a review that complained that this book was too much like an After School Special. (Remember those?). Naturally I started to get concerned.
  
  Now that I'm finished I can say that I don't agree. Although this is a coming-of-age story there is no fluff and no happy endings. It does not focus too much on gritty aspects but after reading
  Tobacco Road I needed a more mellow book to balance out somewhat.
  
  The characters are well-developed, flawed, and nuanced. Rash is a master of describing the local landscape and wildlife that came alive for me even though I am unfamiliar with the hills of Western North Carolina.
  
  Each chapter began with a journal entry of a Civil War era physician. At first I was trying to understand the link between him and the 17-year-old who stole pot plants from a local farmer but Rash tied both stories together nicely at the end.
  
  
• 
  LA

  The images this guy brings to mind are just gorgeous. While I didn't feel the same attachment to any of the characters, except one, as I did in "Serena" and in "Eden," the old journal entries and the beautiful gospel voice of one of them grabbed me tight. A disconsolate young teacher, a boy setting off on the wrong path, and the hangover of a two-sided war will together grab you like a bear trap on the ankle. Big suspense and a Plott hound to boot.
  
  The settings for his tales, however, show off Rash’s powerful poetry, full blast.
  
  An example? While describing a type of rare and colorful brook trout and a stream in winter, Rash writes: ”.. a dark, silent place down there, its metabolism slowed, as close to hibernation as a fish could get. Dogs dreamed. He'd seen them make soft woofs and kick their back legs, eyes closed as they chased a rabbit or coon through the dark woods of their sleep. Travis imagined the speckled trout under the ice, rising in its dreams to sip bright-yellow mayflies from the surface, dreaming of spring as it waited out winter."
  
  Poetry. Joy to read him.
• 
  Shaun

  Like several of Rash's other novels, The World Made Straight is based on one of his short stories. The others I've read have all been successes. This one, not so much.
  
  While the writing was competent, the story too often felt forced and contrived.
  
  In addition, Rash's efforts to develop the Civil War theme, which focused on the struggle between two Southern factions (literally neighbor fighting neighbor), failed. Instead of adding to the story, it became a distraction. Furthermore, the plot was only so-so, with characters and a story-line that occasionally lacked credibility.
  
  That said, there was still a lot of great writing here. It wasn't awful, just not what I've come to expect from Rash. Definitely my least favorite to date.
• 
  Andy Weston

  Set in the backwoods of North Carolina in the 1970s, this is a book that gets close to being ‘Southern Gothic’ without actually getting there. Rash gets sidetracked. Throughout there is the ghost a Civil War battle, which doesn’t quite fit into the story of the 17 year old high school drop out rebelling at years of ill-treatment. The novel is a rare blend of the historic, gritty crime and coming of age, and it works well if the reader doesn’t arrive at it expecting a complete southern gothic, which some previewers promise.
  Young Travis Shelton stumbles on a neighbour’s hidden crop of marijuana while out fishing. The ‘farmer’, Carlton Toomey, is that archetypal southern noir bad guy, controlling the drug trade across the state. Travis is bailed out by Leonard Shuler, a part time drug dealer, who sees the good in the boy and puts him through his high school diploma and gives him a place to live. Rash intersperses the narrative with passages of reference to the Civil War, which gradually explain a problematic family history between the Shelton’s and the Shuler’s; the violence of the Civil War repeated in a 1970s drug battle set against the stark Appalachian landscape.
  
• 
  Bob Redmond

  Rash's novel tells the story of a wayward kid in North Carolina trying to get on his feet. The kid flirts with drugs, alcohol, crime, girls, guns, and has family troubles to boot. He is helped by an older guy who has troubles of his own. The whole saga is set against a backdrop of Civil War history, with some asides on the nature of violence courtesy Simone Weil.
  
  The book reads like a tame "after school special." The characters, let alone the dialogue, are barely believable, and Rash's writing seems at once too careful and ignorant. He's an established southern writer (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls him a "major writer of our time;" Dorothy Allison calls this book "a work of genius"), but the image of young good ol' boys roaring off to "Free Bird" by Skynyrd or calling drugs by their clinical names just doesn't seem realistic. The Civil War history would have made a better story by itself, rather than as it is, a forced leitmotif. (I understand that the comtemporary and historical conflicts are supposed to be slant-rhymes of each other; it comes off as random or irrelevant, given the various states of emergency of the characters.) The "crooked" world of past and present wrongs is _to be made straight_, as the title of the novel and a passage from Handel's Messiah (a favorite of one of the characters) tell us. Rash drives this point home over and over again. Towards the end of the novel, the world is doing all kinds of things: blurring, falling down, tilting, bending... "the world" is invoked over and over again as if repeating the motif over and over will give it weight. But just because the author suggests that it will be right doesn't make it so.
  
  Rash can write a delicate and descriptive paragraph: his prose poem on water at the end of the book is marvelous. His passages on fishing and nature in general are also crystalline, precise, lovely. The novel, however, suffers from the kind of over-writing that contemporary, computer-bound writers craft. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the relationship his characters (poor and southern) have with the academy--they are either dropouts or outsiders in other ways. Rash rubbed off all their rough edges in translation, though, and the book ultimately misses its mark.
  
  WHY I READ THIS BOOK: I saw this book on the table of "books of note" at Elliott Bay Bookstore, and was swayed by the story synopsis and massive amount of praise from newspapers and authors. I wanted to read a comtemporary novel too, but this experience has disheartened me. Like contemporary "indie" music, it seems too easy and beset by cliques of industry (however small or failing). The next book I read will also be fiction; I hope to find something fresher.
• 
  Text Publishing

  ‘An intellectually satisfying work of suspense … [The World Made Straight] reminds us of the sort of compelling literature a brave artist can fashion from the shards of such experience.’
  Los Angeles Times Book Review
  
  ‘[Ron Rash’s] novels are complex and compelling, told in graceful, conscientious prose, and The World Made Straight is his finest yet.’
  Charlotte Observer
  
  ‘Ron Rash writes some of the most memorable novels of this young century … No writer since the late Larry Brown has handled the raw grit of country people as truthfully as Rash… . At once uplifting, harrowing, and unforgettable.’
  News & Observer on The World Made Straight
  
  ‘[The World Made Straight] is the third novel by Ron Rash that has brought my life to a grinding halt—but to praise Rash simply as a powerful storyteller would be to overlook his gifts as a profoundly ethical writer and, at the same time, a poet with a fine and tender eye for the beauty of nature. What I love and admire most of all about this book, however, is its fierce confrontation of a human dilemma that has sparked too many of the world’s most violent tragedies: the burning question of just how much allegiance we owe family and community, including the ghosts from our past.’
  Julia Glass, author of Three Junes
  
  ‘The World Made Straight is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing kind of work, a work of genius—genius and insight and poetry and the kind of language that whispers to me like music coming back off dense wet hills and upturned faces.’
  Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
  
  ‘Rash writes in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and more contemporary writers such as Charles Frazier and Cormac McCarthy. His fiction occupies that strange, language-driven netherland between myth and realism. It’s a dark, poetic, blood-soaked world.’
  Australian
  
  ‘Rash’s stories are firmly located in time and place but have a universalism that transcends both.’
  Otago Daily Times
  
  ‘Woven through the narrative, bloody strands of violence run down through the generations from the Shelton Laurel massacre of 1863 to the savage battle fought by the small-town drug lords of today.’
  North & South
• 
  David Joy

  I personally prefer this novel to SERENA.
• 
  Mary

  Radiant, devastating and compelling. Beautifully written...
• 
  Sean Owen

  Disclaimer: I think Ron Rash is one of the greatest living short story writers in America.
  
  Some writers seem to be able to bring their skills to whatever they set down to write. Russell Banks has produced several notable short stories and yet also managed to produce the 700+ page historical fiction masterpiece "Cloudsplitter" A writer like Rash with an impressive resume of short fiction stumbles so often in his novels that it's hard to believe you're reading the same author. I've read "The Cove" and "Serena" and "The World Made Straight" is better than those, but it will disappoint if you're coming from Rash's short stories.
  
  The fatal weakness in Rash's novels seems to be his reliance on a major event to pivot the plot on. The end result of this reliance is a story that seems at odds with its characters. The perplexing part of this is that Rash's short stories have none of this. It's almost as if he doesn't know what to fill the extra pages with.
  
  Part of what I enjoy most about Rash's fiction is his sense of place and this is strongly in evidence here. Rash understands the weight of history and sets his stories in the 19th century nearly as often as he sets them in the present. He attempts to bring that tension between past and present to play in this novel, but he labors the point too much and puts too much about this past into his characters mouths. Rash's short fiction is more likely to treat the past as an unseen force that weighs on people in ways they feel, but don't truly understand themselves.
  
  I'm torn between a 3 and a 4. I'm going to have to leave it as a 3, because I know Rash is capable of better.
• 
  LindaJ^

  It had been awhile since I dipped into my Ron Rash collection and am so glad I did. Rash writes about the Southern rural poor with language that brings to life not only the gritty underside of day-to-day life but also the beauty of the country, while weaving in a good bit of Southern history.
  
  This 2006 book could be described in a variety of ways. With respect to 17 year old Travis, it is a coming of age story. With respect to mid-30's Leonard, it is a coming to terms story. Both come at huge cost.
  
  The book starts with Travis climbing up to fish the shallow pools for speckled trout because Old Man Jenkins will pay him fifty cents for each one, and Travis needs the money to pay the insurance on the old truck he just bought, since he's lost his job as a bag boy at the local grocery. But Travis ditches the fish when he finds a marijuana patch (behind a NO TRESPASSING sign) and steals five plants.
  
  Travis sells stolen plants to Leonard, who has returned after it looked like he had managed to make something out of himself by completing college and becoming a teacher. Now Leonard sells dope, pills, and bootleg beer, but he is the best shot in the county, taking home the trophy for shooting at the county fair the three years since he's returned.
  
  At this point, the two main characters do not seem very likeable but as time goes on and their lives become intertwined, they seem to bring good things out of each other more often than not. But life is tough. Travis has his teenager moments and Leonard seems, at times, to lack backbone.
  
  Travis and Leonard are intertwined not only in their current lives but in the lives of their ancestor and the Shelton Laurel Massacre that took place during the Civil War. Rash makes good use of this historical event to bind the stories of Travis and Leonard together.
  
  As good as the story of Travis and Leonard is, it is the language that makes it sing, especially the descriptions. For example,
  
  "Leonard took down the the 1859 and 1860 volumes. It had the heft of a family Bible. He know it was the cotton rag paper, so much more substantial than wood-based paper, that and the leather binding, but the words themselves seemed to give the volume much of its weight. The binding creaked like a rusty hinge, pages falling open to the entry Leonard had turned to most often over the years. The words were printed in a careful hand, as if the writer anticipated a moment like this in the future when the entry would be read by other eyes." (p. 115)
  
  "Soon enough there'd be cold days after snow when the low sky turned a blue so dark that come dusk it would seep like ink, stain the white ground deep blue as well." (p. 129)
  
  "There was no driveway, just a bare spot by the house where a decade-old Mercury Comet was parked, no hubcaps and no radio antenna, a wadded rag in place of a gas cap. Leonard had known Lori's family was poor, but he was still surprised. If smoke had not been rising from the chimney, someone driving by could easily believe the place had long been ceded to whatever crawled or slithered through the cracks. The rust-rotted gutter had separated from the roof soffit, and blue platic tarp replaced glass in a window. Out in the yard, a doll without arms, a tricycle with a missing back wheel. Nothing seemed whole." (p. 197-98)
  
  "Fog clung to the trees, moving serpentine in the wood's understory, laying down a low smolder across the pasture. Rane by noon, lasting the rest of the day, the radio announcer had said, but rain was already settling in, letting the fog come first, transforming the landscape into a vast blank whiteness. Bringing with it what it always brought, a quietness like no other, every sound muted, more distant. Almost as though the fog loosened the world at its seams, made everything drift farther apart." (p. 260).
• 
  Rusty

  I didn't intend to read as much of this as I have today--it's that absorbing. So far, about a quarter of the way in, this is a fine poetically charged book I'd recommend to anyone who likes reading the true stuff about Appalachia.
• 
  Robert Warren

  When we were teens in Atlanta, my brother was a wayward hellraiser with a head full of ideas. Even though we were modern kids, the shadows of the Civil War still touched us in various enigmatic ways. He and I agree that very few artists have captured that essence, but he said Ron Rash nailed some of it in World Made Straight. He also said Rash created a character that reminded him of his teen self. So I was eager to check it out. My brother sent it to me.
  
  It's a lovely, unusual book, told in a concise, elegant double narrative that evokes the blacktop, hollers, streams and towns of North Carolina (where my brother now lives) and the distinctive ghost-riddled atmosphere of the haunted hills where America's bloodiest conflict took place. The timelessness of the wild and the hum of the new create a peculiar rhythm and Rash catches it.
  
  Rash is also a poet and it shows; he does a great deal with very few brushstrokes. He makes it look easy.
  
  The time seems to be mid 70s, but could be anytime. One narrative strand is in the voice of embittered-but-lovable Leonard Shuler, an unlucky former schoolteacher and father living with an addicted wreck of a woman in a trailer. He's a whipsmart, disappointed drug dealer cut off from his daughter and just marking time when Travis crosses his path.
  
  Leonard is a student of the Civil War, specifically the Shelton Laurel Massacre, in which innocents suspected of conspiring with Yankees were rounded up and executed in the fog of war. The local folks only whisper of this ancient shame. Leonard refers to an old journal that was kept by a local small town doctor and Confederate medic, and entries from that journal pepper the book, providing a third ghost narrative that offers a glimpse into human nature under stress; as in Leonard and Travis's stories, decisions both heroic and cruel are made. Travis is descended from the victims.
  
  Travis has a hellish home life and he ends up crashing at Leonard's and becoming his de facto student/surrogate kid. (The girlfriend does not take this well.) Since Travis stole some of their pot plants, some local redneck thugs have been after him for awhile, testing him, goading him, even sending him to the hospital. Will Travis stand up to them after they cross one too many lines? Will Leonard back him up and step up to his role as father figure? How does evolving crisis affect Travis's relationships with his folks, his friends, his girlfriend?
  
  In an escalating pitch, the narratives intertwine into a potent coming-of-age tale and a redemption story. Deeply satisfying on many levels.
• 
  Claire Fullerton

  There's a good reason the Atlanta Journal Constitution called Ron Rash “One of the major writers of our time.” To me, he is this and more. Ron Rash writes in a gritty, mountain vernacular that can’t be faked; one has to come from it and know it as their own voice of consciousness in order to wield it as plausibly as he. Rash’s language, therefore, is its own reasoning; it speaks of a clear-cut, hard-edged, uncompromising way of living in the world devoid of the illusion of optimism. One wonders, as they read Rash, if it is the jaded wrappings of cynicism or the unvarnished truth behind his tightly crafted novels. This is a writer who delivers the dark notes of beaten humanity in such a way that there is hope. In The World Made Straight, Travis Shelton comes from nothing, on the cusp of manhood in an unforgiving North Carolina mountain community, where drug-dealing is a viable livelihood, in this hardscrabble region with few opportunities outside of one’s own wits. It is the glimmer of something more that drives him to prove himself to his rough-hewed, hard-nosed father. Travis seeks to better himself after one fight too many; he leaves the tobacco fields on his family’s land and presents himself at the trailer of a local named Leonard, who is both drug-dealer and mentor, in that he is the only one in Travis’ sphere who, at one time, amounted to anything, though fate made it short-lived. Under Leonard’s influence, Travis pursues his high school GED, while shouldering the fall-out of the one false move he made, when he riled the shackles of local heavy-weight, Carlton Toomey, when he trespassed on his land. These are mountain characters who play by their own lawless rules, in a landscape where it’s every man for himself. In a climate still stinging from the horrors of the Civil War, the characters are born beneath the shadow of the ties that atavistically bind them, albeit through a sense of random tribal placement that haunts this story in an unfolding mystery, the impact of which the characters are not completely aware, until the looming puzzle work fits. It is a small world, in The World Made Straight, but it is universal in implication. Self-worth, justice, revenge, and hope against all odds flavors this story, which ends in notes of satisfaction and just deserves.
• 
  Larry H

  Although he doesn't seem to write super-happy books, Ron Rash is a fantastic writer. And this book was another great one of his. Bleak and a bit depressing, yes, but fantastically well-written. I had read the first chapter of the book when it was a short story in a Best American Short Stories collection a few years back, and I remember the story itself haunted me for a while.
  
  
  
  Travis is a high-school dropout and farm kid, aimlessly looking for some way to escape what he sees as his dead-end life. One day he comes upon some marijuana plants in the woods and realizes he can make some good money off his findings. And then he steps into a bear trap set by the farmers growing the marijuana. What happens from that point on takes Travis on a journey of discovery, both about himself and the world around him. I need to add the rest of Rash's books to my list now.
• 
  Joan Colby

  Unlike others mining the same vein, Ron Rash invariably treats his troubled characters with compassion. While The World Made Straight is not his strongest book, it’s certainly commendable. The characters are Travis, a bright teenage boy whose farm family, particularly his father, scorns intellectual curiosity. Travis is typical of hardscrabble Appalachian kids whose entertainment focuses on beer, drugs,music and girls. The second main character is Leonard, an ex-teacher who lost his license having been set-up by a revengeful student, which resulted in the further loss of his wife and daughter, leading to depression, drinking and peddling drugs. Fate brings Travis and Leonard together and ultimately forces a standoff with the murderous Toomeys. Rash, while sympathetic to the poor whites of the North Carolina hills, never sugarcoats the hard realities.
• 
  Kasa Cotugno

  Ron Rash epitomizes the new southern writer, one writing about a south still showing the scars of the War Between the States from a deeper perspective. This novel is grounded in its portrayal of characters rooted in specific time and place, written without irony, old fashioned story telling, but uneven in its pacing. There were sections that took my breath away, and others that I had to struggle with to keep going.
• 
  Gatorman

  Excellent tale from Rash. He writes with a poetic quality that really brings the story to life. Enjoyed the Civil War aspect as well. Highly recommended.
• 
  Claudia Putnam

  This is a good novel to read right now. It certainly doesn't address racism in the South, but it does address the supposed legacy of honor and tradition in the Confederacy by examining how neighbor turned on neighbor in mountain counties which were often intensely divided on the subject of secession. Apparently, once the Confederacy was established, massacres of dissenting communities by their former friends and even relatives were common, and the present-day legacy of one such event is at the core of this novel.
  
  My first Ron Rash. Landscape beautifully evoked, as expected. Loved the sense of hauntedness--how you know a place is haunted when it feels more real than anything else. Loved the doctor's journals. Loved the whole complexity of the Civil War Era history and how certain people were still holding onto it. Except--it wasn't exactly clear how, or how closely or in what ways it had deformed them or kept them from growing past it. You could see that it still haunted them, but not how it still gripped them--in what ways did the Civil War keep Travis's daddy from letting Travis go to college, or keep Toomey from using his gifts for anything other than evil, or Leonard from being less passive? You felt that it somehow poisoned everyone, but it was hard to see exactly why or how. Nor could I ever see exactly WHAT happened at Shelton Laurel, as in, why the massacre happened, as in what exact position those at Shelton Laurel had taken and why, and whether they had been armed and what had caused them to be so hated and whether there had been any inverse parallels up North. I gathered that the county had been divided over secession, and the Sheltons had been pro-Lincoln, had not enlisted in the Confederacy, which must have been ballsy after the War started, and had for some reason not fled as, say, the Tories had during the Revolution. But, I dunno, it was all like looking through the glasses with the wrong prescription and I didn't see why there couldn't have been a clearer historical analysis, or at least two different story traditions given. I mean, Travis is reading books on it. What do the books say?
  
  And a clearer line between the present and the past could have been drawn.
  
  I didn't get the sense that the world was made straight.
  
  I wanted this to be a great American novel, but it felt too thin and tentative in the end. However, I'll read more Rash for sure.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Kathrina

  I love reading the works of poets turned to novelists, and this one doesn't disappoint. The imagery and Appalachian landscape are wrought thoughtfully and are deeply felt. The story itself is tragic. Through the POV of a young man still defining his own life, we glimpse laterally the life of a man who has allowed circumstances to direct his fate, and not until his final moment does he choose his own action. It saves the life of our POV, but it ends his. He is a hero, but tragically, his heroism is witnessed solely by the reader. Ingeniously, Rash intertwines this story with an historical footnote of a Civil War massacre, an incident that shares the same location and landscape. The parallels are fascinating. What I loved best here were the character studies of both Leonard and "the bad guy", Carlton. Carlton is interesting, in that he's obviously an intelligent man, who did make choices to live the life he did, though his ethics are warped, while Leonard, also intelligent, and ethical, did not make the conscious choices to define himself. Both suffer. Rash implies that Travis learns the value of making his own deliberate choices, even when disguised by a bossy girlfriend, as they do ride into the sunset together.
  I understand the film is coming soon. Steve Earle plays Carlton. For that alone, I'll be watching for it.
• 
  Felix

  This is a good coming-of-age book with local flavor for me, since it takes place in the North Carolina mountains not far from my home in Chattanooga. Woven into the narrative are some facts about the Civil War, which is another interest of mine.
  
  The central character, Travis Shelton, comes to terms with the grim realities of his own life, with the extra dimension of historical influences he discovers with the help of an unlkely mentor, disgraced teacher Leonard Shuler, now dealing drugs from a dilapidated trailer high in the mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina.
  
  Well-told, interesting in detail, reminds me of Faulkner's comment on the past:
  
  The past is not dead. It is not even past.
• 
  Jim

  Perhaps not as good as some of his other books, but an enjoyable story nevertheless, and Rash is rapidly climbing up in the ranks of my favorite authors. I like his pace and voice, and the fact that he describes a world I am more familiar with than many books I read. All of the characters are deeply flawed, kind of like the people who inhabited the area and fought a vicious civil war within the Civil War in the Appalachians. The characters are not one dimensional though and have some depth. With the exception of one character, none to me would be that appealing as friends. But these are definitely people I know or knew, to a point.