Publishers Weekly
04/12/2021
Musings on the existence of God and free will suffuse this elegiac tale of East Texas meth dealers, their clients, and their suppliers, from Wade (All Things Left Wild). John Curtis has carved out his niche as local meth boss through raw psychopathic ruthlessness. During one of Curtis’s prolonged absences, a strung-out teenage girl who goes by River arrives by chance at the door of the filthy trailer he shares with his 12-year-old son, Jonah, bringing with her a backpack filled with meth, which she stole from Curtis. Jonah invites her in and cares for her during her difficult withdrawal from the drugs. Once clean, she realizes where she is, and both Jonah and River recognize that their only hope of survival is to get as far away from Curtis as possible. They decide to flee, sell the drugs to another dealer, and start over. As River says, “This is our last chance at a different life. At any life.” Thus begins their dangerous odyssey toward an inevitably violent conclusion. Any momentum is slowed or blocked by the author’s persistent need to preach in the form of unlikely utterances coming from the mouths of his characters. Those seeking a poignant allegory on despair may be satisfied, but thriller fans need not apply. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (June)
Kirkus Reviews
2021-01-27
Wade, whose striking debut, All Things Left Wild (2020), traveled back a century in Texas history, uses an unlikely friendship to explore an equally wild present-day landscape.
John Curtis runs a far-reaching crystal meth empire in East Texas. Dakota Cade, whose life he saved in Iraq, helps him keep potential insubordinates in line, and he’s even branched out into running dogfights that fuel his sense of social relations at their most atavistic and conflictual. But even the closest-knit families have their problems, and one day Cade’s 17-year-old tweaker girlfriend grabs a knapsack stuffed with product and takes off. As she wanders the woods, she encounters Jonah Hargrove, 12, whose abusive father gives him little enough reason to stick close to home, and the two of them, in a marriage of Cormac McCarthy and Deliverance, go into hiding together. The story burns slowly at first, its early stages laced with lyrical passages about nature and solitude and eternity. Gradually, however, the suspense implicit in the children’s journey builds to match Wade’s overheated rhetoric. Curtis finds himself pinched between “Mexicans on one front, feds on the other….And between it all, the girl.” Mr. Carson, the elderly neighbor who seems to be Jonah’s only real friend, supplies the pair with a canoe, but it’s far from certain that they can escape the dragnet laid by Curtis, not to mention all those feds and Mexicans. At length the decorously spaced casualties mount until they reach the fugitives.
A haunting fable of an impossible relationship fueled by elemental need and despair.
