Q Road: A Novel
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
Pub Date: September 2002
Price : $24.00
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0-7432-0365-8

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s first novel--quirky, surprising, and ultimately very touching--centers on a small, eccentric community in rural Michigan. Once entirely a farming community, it's now a hodge-podge of farms, pre-fabricated housing developments, and a golf course - bringing together, onto skinny little Q Road (known as "Queer Road" by locals), an unlikely collection of people.

Rachel is our heroine. A teenage girl of unusual thoughts and few words (most of them foul), she wears a rifle over her shoulder and is driven by a powerful desire for the "damned land", the only thing she considers worth having in this big, open country. Her young friend David smokes cigarettes to strengthen his asthmatic lungs and idolizes the weathered farmer George Harland, who owns "near the oldest barn in Greenland Township." 50-year-old George falls in love with the young Rachel, who with her mama nowhere to be found accepts George’s land then finally George himself.

Along the way, we meet the neighbors: David's neglectful, barfly mother; Milton Taylor, the born-again owner of the religious-themed Barn Grill with a giant, neon Last Supper hologram hanging over the bar, the lascivious window salesman from the city and his discontented wife, and the crazy woman obsessed with tabloids and alien landings.

The action of the book all takes place on a day that begins like any other, with each of the neighbors in his or her own home or routine, but by the afternoon an important, dangerous, and unpredicted event takes place, bringing them all together and serving as both community and personal awakening for each of them.

Q Road is a passionate, dark, yet funny novel where ferocious women, confused men, and hungry children battle, while the woolly-bear caterpillars inch across the road.

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