From the Black Hills Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

From the Black Hills Book

Reader, beware: there is no joy in Judy Troy's From the Black Hills, a bleak vision of rural life in South Dakota at the end of the 20th century. The story revolves around Mike Newlin, a small-town high school senior whose father has recently disappeared after murdering his office receptionist. In the aftermath of this shocking event, Mike is understandably traumatized; on the surface, however, life goes on. Mike goes to work, cares for his shattered mother, has sex with his girlfriend, Donetta, while fantasizing about his employer's wife, Lee-Ann. Troy sets herself an interesting challenge here as she attempts to convey the innermost thoughts and feelings of inarticulate people. Mostly she does this through prose that is deceptively simple. When told by his boss about the murder, for example, Mike thinks: "He didn't know anything. That was what he couldn't put into words--what it was like to discover that there were things you almost knew but didn't know. He looked away from Neil. He leaned down and picked up Janna's dolls. He put them one by one in her red toy box." As the summer wears on, life gets more complicated. Mike and Lee-Ann circle their mutual attraction warily; a criminal investigator assigned to the murder develops a yen for Mike's mother; and, inevitably, Mike's father resurfaces, forcing his son into an untenable position. Though there's not much light in Judy Troy's Black Hills, by the end of the novel there is a ray or two of hope. --Alix WilberRead More

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  • Product Description

    A decent, ordinary life jeopardized by a catastrophically extraordinary event: this is the story, mythic in its outline and substance, that Judy Troy--author of two New York Times Notable Books and Whiting award winner--tells in From the Black Hills.  
        
    In Wheatley, South Dakota, during the summer before Mike Newlin is to begin college, his father, an insurance salesman, shoots and kills the young woman who works for him as his receptionist. He disappears, and Mike is left behind in shock and grief. With his future suddenly obscured, Mike finds himself nearly overwhelmed by his present circumstances--not only the emotional damage inflicted by his father's awful crime but also his mother's dismay, the insinuating methods of a criminal investigator named Tom DeWitt, his girlfriend's anxieties, and his longing for an older woman who lives nearby--and the question of whether he will ever see his father again and what will happen if he does.  
      
    As imposing as the landscape that forms its setting, From the Black Hills conveys with compassionate power the drama of a young man who must try to overcome his father's dark legacy.


    From the Hardcover edition.

  • 0812991737
  • 9780812991734
  • Judy Troy
  • 1 June 1999
  • Random House (NY)
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 300
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