Against the Country

"Town" is the place left behind, the place where our narrator might have grown up in something approximate to sanity, if life had gone differently. Instead, this is the story of a boy taken from Town and transported by his parents to rural Virginia, a hellish place where children are treated like mules and miseries are as numerous as flies. The boy's story is not told in a linear format. Rather, readers are sucked into winding, wordy paragraphs that pulse from eloquent reflections on topics as diverse as religion and whipping sticks. The experience of riding the school bus, for example, includes sentences like "I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation's children by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot?" For some teens, the innovative structure will be a refreshing change from traditional storytelling. Experimentation in art is often well appreciated by young, flexible minds. For others, the novelty of the text may be short-lived.