Smith Henderson

“...the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.”

Pete Snow is a social worker who rescues children from abusive and dysfunctional families in the hinterlands of Montana. He gets kids out of dangerous houses and tries to find better environments for them to live in. This is fairly heroic stuff and we are supposed to like him for it but his own family is a mess, he walked out on his wife and daughter when his wife cheated on him, his brother is on the run after beating up his parole officer and he's a misogynistic alcoholic who drinks himself into violence, punching out his own car windows on one occasion and a young client in the stomach on another.

When Pete encounters undernourished twelve year-old Benjamin Pearl, the son of a profoundly disturbed anti-government, apocalyptic, paranoid who reveres the Old Testament and whose delusions have driven him and his family to live in the wilderness, Pete must gradually try and gain Jeremiah’s trust. As Pete's own family spins out of control (his daughter runs away from home), Pearl's activities spark the interest of the federal agencies and puts Pete in to the middle of a massive manhunt.

The story is told with a third-person narrator which infuses the novel with an element of realism. There are some conversations but these are somewhat stage-managed but we can see Pete's smart-ass remarks as a way of dealing with the stresses of his job as he struggles to infuse a little decency into the lives of his clients.

With the probable exception of the paranoid Pearl none of the characters in this book are very likeable, this is particularly true of the women who are generally sluts and harpies. Most of the chapters focus on Pete but interspersed within the main plot there are short sections in which his daughter Rachel/ Rose chats with a mystery person, presumably the reader. Personally I don't feel that I really needed to read about the childhood sexual exploitation she faced as a runaway and felt that they were a distraction rather than adding to the main story. I also felt that it simply took too long for us to meet Jeremiah and would have liked to have seen him introduced earlier but on the whole I found this to be compulsive reading and I generally enjoyed it, Henderson does a good job of making Pete’s life complicated without confusing the reader and without giving away the ending I will sat that it doesn't end in a complete disaster. Social work is filled with bleakness as well as hope.… (meer)

If you want an action-packed book, you should probably pass on this - it's a fairly slow burner, which fits in with the setting and the people. This is mainly a book about people and situations, mostly poor people living a simple life. Ever wonder where young prostitutes or other misfits come from? Or how a paranoid survivalist becomes that way? This book gives a stark, seemingly realistic view of some of these people up close and personal.

These people are not the type that most of us know or even associate with most of the time. The main character, Pete, works for the Montana social services, and mostly travels around to isolated places helping people, especially the kids. There are three stories going on, all involving kids from dysfunctional families; one of those families is Pete's. He is much better at helping the other families than his own, unfortunately. And to me, his family's story was the saddest as we watch his young, underage daughter descend into a life that no 14 year old should experience. And true to form, poor Pete does a worse job for his family than the others.

One of the other families is a paranoid survivalist and his son who live off the grid. Except as the story progresses, he starts seeming a little less crazy about his paranoia. Just because he's a crazy paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get him.

Then there's the mother who gave up on life sometimes in the past, with her two young kids. She doesn't even try to do the right thing, and her young son is out of control. She just wants rid of him, and he feels the same. But there's a younger sister that's still good, and she's one of the reason's Pete still cares about his job.

Pete is the common thread in the story. He's a good person, though far from perfect. But in spite of his flaws, we need more people like him in this world, especially in the small towns where he lives. He genuinely cares about people and wants to help them, even when it would make the most sense to let them go. He gets beat up just doing his job. Not to mention threatened by guns, etc. But he still doesn't give up.

I'll definitely look for more books from this author, and hope some of his other books are as unique as this one.… (meer)