River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa

From a striking talent with keen powers of observation comes this evocation of an eccentric family’s tangled connections—between themselves, an unlikely cast of locals, and a seldom-documented urban Iowa, one not of cows and cornstalks but of thrift stores, TV dinners, and bridges spanning the muddy sprawl of the Mississippi River.

By turns uplifting and harrowing, Ben Miller’s prose portrays a boy’s quest to make his life...