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Q ROAD Bonnie Jo Campbell from Amazon.com, September 21, 2002 It would be wrong of me not to plug this book, since I can remember nothing in the last couple of years that is both stirring and still steeped in mystery. This book glows with the land-bound energy of thousands of lives, and not a wooly bear or black eyed susan can do anything if not reverberate against the template of all that human despair and exhilaration in the name of survival. Larry Brown and Chris Offutt are peers, but Campbell is more evocative than Brown, and more subtle than Offutt. It's erotic and devastatingly funny, but when you finish there is a gestalt one feels, because the love of the land AND its inhabitants (the two go together) in this thing grows larger as you read, and the small, individual scenes sink into the book's larger purposes, which is to lament, with love, the present tense as it slides past, turning into history, the kind of history that is writ large in landscapes when one is attentive. In the past I've thought I've heard voices in old ruined houses, at dusk, out in some woods, and Q Road reminds me of those small transcendent moments on earth. There are plenty of stories embedded in this novel, and they all smolder beautifully together. I loved this book, and I hope a million readers discover Q Road and Bonnie Jo Campbell.
Reviewer: David Dodd Lee from Kalamazoo, MI
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