A Desolate Splendor

by John Jantunen

A chilling portrait of a family fighting to preserve their humanity in a cruel and merciless world

The collapse of civilization has left the survivors scattered amongst a few settlements along the wilderness fringe of a land ravaged by war. Preyed upon by roving bands of sadistic ex-soldiers and ever at the mercy of a natural world that has turned against them, a family is facing their final days. Hope appears in the guise of their young son. Raised in isolation and taught by his father to survive at any cost, he is thrust headlong into a battle for the future of humankind after rescuing a girl fleeing from a savage and relentless cult bent on burning the world back to Eden.

Raw and unflinching, A Desolate Splendor weaves a stark, and eerily familiar, portrayal of life on the brink of extinction and heralds the rise of an exciting new voice in apocalyptic fiction.

Genres: Dystopia

312 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2016

Reviews

[Leah Bayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book, but I found the description incredibly misleading. Yes, this is a post-apocalyptic novel about survival in the aftermath of disaster. But the end of the world event is basically set dressing: there are many clues that this is the future but there is almost no information about what happened (or why). This isn't a negative at all, and it adds a lot of atmosphere, but the blurb gives a very precise summary of events that... well... don't really occur. The two "sets" of bad guys (Reds and Echoes) are not described as being ex-soliders or a weird death cult. The reader is given descriptions of them and their actions, but is really left to draw their own conclusion about motivations and background.

It's a style of writing I really like: we're thrown into this survival situation with no information, and have to find our own footing. The narrative is very colloquial in style: many characters aren't even given names (for example, we have 'the boy' and 'Pa'), and there are no quotation marks during dialogue. And while that, along with the father/son dynamic and setting, may draw comparisons to The Road, they're wildly different books. A Desolate Splendor has several overlapping character groups, and we switch between them quite frequently. Some have names, some don't. We get inside the head of some, and are left in the dark about others. The story flits rapidly between plot points and it really takes a while to figure out how any of these stories are connected, but they come together beautifully.

This is the type of book for people who like raw, gritty survival takes. It's a dark book, with a lot of violence, but none of it is ever gratuitous. We're shown how desolate and scary the world has become, but perhaps more frighteningly we see how easily humans adapt to this cruelty. There's not an ounce of telling in this book: character motivations, histories, and even some key plot events are left for the reader to deduce themselves. It's not a book that holds your hand or offers even an ounce of help, and I loved that. I'd go back and carefully re-read paragraphs to pick up on any hints I missed, and it was so satisfying when I felt like I 'solved' something myself. Recommended if you want an apocalyptic tale that feels like grit-lit.

[arc provided by netgalley in exchange for an honest review]

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am on my third read now. I can’t quite put into words… I’m not quite certain how the author did this. There is a moment, in fact, (the Native brothers attacking the encampment, I think), where I came to realize Jantunen had managed to transcend just about any fiction I’ve read in the past 20 years. I immersed myself in that section over and over until it coursed through my subconscious. The author had reached a plane unknown to most — text perhaps unknown even to himself before the moment of its creation. What Gardner talked about in the Art of Fiction, where the words lose their intentionality, and float there to be experienced in symbiosis. This is a difficult read, I'll admit. You are required to give yourself to it, in order to allow it to wash over you. But though the book could at first be seen as merely a riff of words ordered with extreme skill, the author is clearly aiming for a communion with his reader -- psychic, conscious, and emotional -- of an untapped truth shared by both, and by all. It is, in a word, breathtaking.

[John Jantunen]

QUILL & QUIRE REVIEW

It may have become too easy to invoke the name Cormac McCarthy when discussing a certain strain of contemporary fiction, but when the shoe fits so snugly, such comparisons are unavoidable.

John Jantunen’s second novel is firmly set in McCarthy country. The time and place are indeterminate, but the social, physical, and linguistic landscapes are very much borrowed from the master. A great war, or some such collapse, has destroyed civilization and thrust humanity several hundred – or even thousand – years back into a preindustrial, barely agricultural wasteland. It is a reflexive American frontier, a burnt-out district of mythic savagery over which the course of empire runs in reverse.

The figures in this landscape have degenerated in a similar way. They are not intellectual or spiritual beings; their morality is scarcely advanced beyond Bronze Age concepts of loyalty to one’s family or one’s hounds. There is no God in heaven, only “the desolate splendor of the world beyond ours” – meaning the stars. On the earthly plane, life has been reduced to the rudiments of survival: gathering food, rutting, and fighting off wild animals (including murderous tribes of other, even further devolved humans).

The language has the poetic twang of McCarthy’s folksy-archaic-Biblical style: “Above the camp, the moon peered through a hazy drift of smoke and the stars were but motes coruscate against the void, indifferent and laggard in their contemplation of the mortal world below.” A man stands beneath these stars in “sullen recompose,” listening to a woman “break into baleful lamentations.” The direct speech – unencumbered, as in McCarthy, with quotation marks – is rendered in a rustic dialect that’s a generation removed from book learnin’. One of the characters complains that “I’ma tryin ta read” when in fact he is only describing pictures in books.

This is the world of A Desolate Splendor, and if it sounds like a McCarthy novel, right down to the archetypal characters – centrally, “the man” and “the boy” – that’s still some achievement. However, Jantunen is a talented storyteller in his own right, with a real gift for describing the richness and magical qualities of the natural world. There is something remarkably romantic and pagan in his evocation of the post-Apocalyptic wilderness. Though the characters seem at times to be little advanced from the mud or trees, that natural environment is itself a thrilling, animistic place, where even the rocks seem to have a monstrous life of their own and “frogsong trill[s] in a nebulous thunder.”

The story is an odd piece of work, consisting of several different narrative blocks that bump into each other in bloody ways. The main characters are the boy and his father, who are homesteaders. The other groups include a gang of desperadoes, a pair of neo-native warriors, and a gathering of female breed stock. Also in the mix are feral packs of humanity who decorate their bodies with bones and paint. Instead of resolution the novel moves toward an affirmation of continuity, albeit at the lowest level of the continuance of the species. Civilization doesn’t seem likely to experience a rebound.

As familiar as some of this terrain has become, A Desolate Splendor surveys it with bleak confidence: a forceful, visionary novel written in passionate and sensual language.

SCENE MAGAZINE REVIEW

John Jantunen's A Desolate Splendor is a bleak portrayal of the depths to which humanity can sink, checkered with moment of optimism and resilience. A carefree girl torn from all she knows and plunged into a life of abuse and brutality, finds her freedom but has trouble leaving the violence behind. A sadistic troupe of former soldiers has their protection scheme ruined when a nearby town is attacked and burned to the ground, forcing those to set out after those responsible. And a hope-filled boy raised in isolation to hunt, farm and survive against an increasingly capricious natural world finds that life outside his hidden valley is worse than he had ever thought possible. These stories collide against a war-ravaged backdrop of humanity's potential extinction where life is fragile, safety an illusion and life and death decisions have become the norm. A Desolate Splendor is intense, intelligent and unflinchingly brutal in its portrayal of a frontier atmosphere where human society has completely broken down into violent tribes and selfish individualism. Jantunen spares little in his depiction of depravity and misuse of power including murder, assault and much worse, a chillingly possible future reminiscent of events all-too-frequently present in humanity's past and present. Although absorbing and well-written from start to finish, Jantunen's book will not be for everyone.* Fans of noir thriller and post-apocalyptic fiction will find this tale thrilling and realistic but others may find the bleak tone and graphic descriptions unsettling.

(*Author's note: And I wouldn't have it any other way.)

THE WINNIPEG REVIEW

John Jantunen’s second novel is a post-apocalyptic western that some are comparing to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian. While the novel stands on its own, the parallels are certainly there: the grim “frontier” setting, the southern vernacular, the occasional King James English, the absence of quotation marks and so on. More broadly, it works within a framework that we have come to associate with post-apocalyptic fiction, one that cleans the slate of civilization and moral norms and creates a playground for grand ethical and existential questions. In A Desolate Splendor, the narrative shifts between a boy protagonist and his family to the experiences of slaves, ruthless ex-soldiers, wanderers, tribal warriors and vulnerable homesteaders—until these stories intertwine in a violent high-stakes finale.

These are primal and familial stories, Old Testament in character, alternating between scenes of brutality and tenderness, between a Lord of the Flies kind of chaos and intimate moments of human connection. Like McCarthy, Jantunen utilizes a bleak and barbaric setting to illuminate the beautiful minutia of human experience (hence the title). The image of a mother nursing her child, for instance, is all the more moving in a world where babies are frequently fed to snarling dogs. Jantunen’s prose is often precise in these moments, clean and clear with sincerity, exemplified when a sex-slave named Elsa finally escapes her captors: “Six years, she thought. And nine children. A bountiful harvest, in the leanest of times.”

Playing with this kind of brutality/tenderness binary has become increasingly popular in post-apocalyptic stories and their cousins, primitive “frontier” stories, which are seen everywhere from literary fiction like McCarthy’s work to blockbuster TV like Games of Thrones. Unflinching examinations of violence, incest, rape, infanticide and cannibalism are scattered throughout Jantunen’s novel. And while they are at times effective, they are more often heavy-handed and gratuitous, even bathetic—an old, perhaps tiring, criticism of many current post-apocalyptic and frontier stories. Note the following scene where two warriors, Ostes and Nisi, attack a sleeping camp:

The giant barely raised his arms to strike when there was a blade puncturing his gut and driving upwards, slicing a trench to his chin. With his free hand, Ostes reached into his gored manifold and clutched at the giant’s heart, playing him as a puppet and pushing him back into the tent.

And later:

His light shone over a writhing sea awash in blood and entrails. The ground was a cluttered wreck of arms and legs and bodies hacked into pieces, the trail of woe enlivened only by the spasmodic tremors of life in retreat of its foe—hands clutching at spilled guts and stemming geysers and one severed from its master and twitching on its back like an overturned turtle.

The gruesomeness of this scene is oddly cartoonish, inadvertently dissonant and off-kilter from the realism of the novel. Instead of letting the intensity of the violence speak for itself, Jantunen’s prose is equally florid and extreme. The unexpected musicality of “gored manifold” and “trail of woe… retreat of its foe” has a liveliness that is unaware of the solemnity of its content, similar to the manner in which the metaphorical language creates an unintentionally comic tone (it is hard to imagine an overturned turtle being anything but cute). The portrayal of uncensored violence requires fine-honed censorship, an awareness and emotional connection to the heft and ramifications of that violence. This is essential work: readers are quick to discern when they are being force-fed something, when the writer is trying to manipulate them with easy tricks. At its best, such prose is gut-wrenching without being heart-wrenching; at its worst, it simply appears adolescent.

But this hollowed and eager portrayal of violence and post-civilized depravity is indicative of the strengths of A Desolate Splendor, which is written with a confident kind of impetus and drama. It has an honesty of intention that might be compared to Stephen King (who is thanked in the Acknowledgements), and there are moments when Jantunen can make us shiver as something creeps in the shadows or cheer as a loyal dog saves a boy’s life. Take this moment involving a child and his deathly-ill mother: “When his father came into the room just after dark, they were lying in bed, his wife curled around his son’s back, holding him so tight that it looked like he’d have to break her arms to get them apart.”

The novel abounds with this raw type of physical emotion. One of Jantunen’s strengths as a writer is his understanding of the physical intimacy between family and lovers. Although the Game of Thrones style of violence may cause some readers to roll their eyes, Jantunen’s characters are real, their relationships are real, and we root for them regardless.

THE GOOSE (A SCHOLARLY REVIEW)

John Jantunen's A Desolate Splendor is set in an ambiguously apocalyptic future. The world has become reduced to isolated communities and sometimes just to single homesteads in an encroaching wilderness filled with the threats of nature and the far more dangerous remnants of human civilization.

Given this setting, the book’s epigraph, taken from John Wesley's hymn, “The Great Archangel’s Trump Shall Sound,” takes on the role almost of an interpretive key. The verse it quotes reads,

We, when the stars from heaven shall fall, And mountains are on mountains hurl’d, Shall stand unmoved amidst them all, And smile to see a burning world.

Taken in their original context, these lines express a certain religious perspective on the apocalypse, where the “we” who have the assurance of God’s favour can remain unmoved and even joyful in the midst of the world’s destruction because this ending only heralds the beginning of a new and more glorious world to come.

This was certainly John Wesley’s professed belief. He preached in “The Great Assize” that the end of the world would be accompanied by tremendous upheavals in the heavens and the earth, but also by the physical return of Christ in glory. To Wesley, and to those who sang his hymns, the apocalypse was not to be feared, but to be welcomed as the sign of a new heaven and a new earth. It was in this sense that they could smile to see a burning world.

Most of the characters in A Desolate Splendor also smile to see a burning world in one sense or another, but rarely in the sense of Wesley’s hymn. In a short opening section, Jantunen introduces the Echoes, a group of vicious cannibals who cut out their own tongues. He describes them with biblical language but does so in a context that explicitly subverts its traditional religious interpretation. The Echoes use children to lure settlers from their homes, Jantunen writes, because “it had been written that a child shall lead them and so it was” (front matter), a reference to Isaiah 11:6, which reads in full,

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. (New International Version)

This passage is traditionally interpreted as describing paradise, and commentators have tended to emphasize the radical peace that it depicts, wherein even the most fearsome predators live in harmony with their prey and a little child doesn’t fear to lead them. This interpretation accords nicely with Wesley’s beliefs, in which the tribulations of the apocalypse will give way to a better world.

The Echoes, however, interpret this passage very differently, using it with terrible irony to justify sending children to lure settlers to their deaths. The language of wolves living with lambs becomes sinister as they kill families and burn their homesteads. The language of lions lying with yearlings becomes horrific as they rape young girls. The Echoes are certainly smiling to see the world burn, but not remotely in the way Wesley intended.

Jantunen reinforces this representation of the Echoes later in the story, when two young native men come across the aftermath of the Echoes’ destruction. They find a handwritten sign that paraphrases Genesis 6:13: “God said, the end of all flesh has come before me for the earth is filled with violence through them". The passage is from the story of Noah, in which God decrees the destruction of the world by water, and it is generally understood to mean that God needed to cleanse the world because of humanity’s violence.

Once again though, the Echoes reinterpret the passage, this time to mean that they are themselves the violence that will end all flesh. By implication, they are the second cleansing of the world, the cleansing that comes with fire. Their purpose is to purify the world of its violence through a final and terrible violence. They smile to see the world burn because it is the fulfilment of their purpose to burn it.

In sharp contrast to the Echoes, the character of Ma, usually just called “the woman,” does read the scriptures in a Wesleyan way, but even she fails in the end to find comfort there. In one early scene, she quotes the Gospel of Matthew: “Look at the birds of the air, she recited, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?", and she finds a "truth hidden in there that she had never seen before and was comforted by its simple message of hope”. She turns to scripture in this way several times early in the story, and she also sings hymns to cheer herself and her family.

As she’s dying, however, this assurance leaves her. She begins to fixate on her incestuous marriage to her brother, a matter of necessity but no less evil in her mind. The scriptures that had once been a comfort now seem only to condemn her, and she becomes convinced that she’s damned. The smile of Wesley’s hymn, at the very moment it should be fulfilling its promise, seems frail and powerless in the face of her burning world.

This is perhaps the reason that her son, named only as “the boy,” gives up on his mother’s faith after she dies. Before her death, he prays several times and is able to find some comfort this way. Once, when his father has gone to hunt some marauding dogs, he prays to little effect, and then prays again. “This time,” Jantunen writes, “hope spilled out of him and he knew that no harm would come to his father". This is the smile of Wesley’s hymn as it is meant to be, but after the woman’s death, the hope of prayer is no longer available to him. He reads a randomly chosen scripture one last time over her grave and then tosses the Bible in after her, burying her faith alongside her body. From this point on, the boy almost never talks about prayer or religion again.

In fact, the novel itself only makes one more explicit mention of these themes. Elsa, a mother and grandmother who has been captured by the Echoes and rescued by the two native youth, is captured again by a band of ex-soldiers. Having injured one with an arrow, she is hung by the soldiers so that only her toes can touch the ground. Left to suffocate slowly, Jantunen writes, “she hummed old hymns, whispering to herself between the verses, One more breath. That’s all, old girl. Just one more breath”: perhaps the only character whose belief holds true.

At this point in the novel, the use of Wesley’s hymn as an epigraph begins to feel like a harsh irony. At best, Jantunen represents it as failing to make good on its promises. At worst, he shows it to be the foundation of a twisted and sadistic violence. Elsa’s example feels like a tragic exception that proves a worse-than-tragic rule and that leads only to a painful death, in any case.

There is, however, a sense in which A Desolate Splendor recuperates the assurance and joy of Wesley’s hymn —not in religion but in story. There is a moment when the boy’s father takes him to the quarry for his birthday, an annual tradition. They eat taffy, they drink moonshine, and they tell stories that draw on past mythologies and new myths arising out of their own lives. The boy returns several times to the quarry and to the giant tree that his father tells him is the centre of the world. It becomes a symbolic place to him, a place where he can both literally and figuratively look out and take stock of his world, where he can tell the stories that make sense of it.

Later, the boy helps rescue Elsa’s surviving family from the soldiers, and he leads them home toward his father’s homestead. He begins telling the women and children the stories and myths of his life, the ones handed down to him at the quarry and new ones also. They become the emotional correlate of the physical journey out of captivity and violence into peace and security.

Later still, as the boy is waiting at the quarry with one of the rescued girls, he tells stories for her, too, once again drawing from the stock of family myths and adding stories of his own invention. The boy is able to tell the girl her own story as he sees it in the stars, and through the telling he is even able to make her laugh, despite the violence lying both behind and before her.

In each case, A Desolate Splendor holds out these stories to be the smile in the midst of a burning world. It suggests that telling stories from one person to the other offers perhaps the only remaining means to stand unmoved as the stars fall from the sky and the mountains are hurled atop each other.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? I loved it. Yeah, I see why nearly every reviewer has to bring up CM (and there's nothing wrong with the comparisons or with using his work as inspiration), but there's a lot more going on in this book.

First, dogs. Anyone putting this many dogs into a story and paying attention to the details about them gets a win, in my not so humble opinion.

Second, the presentation of the roving band hit me at first as kind of silly, then quickly morphed into a truly horrifying feeling. Like when you're deep in a ghost story and then something falls down unexpectedly and without explanation, like a constant play on your expectations of what is and of what is to come.

Third, the range of characters. Yeah, it took a bit of thinkin' to keep them together in my head, but as I got comfortable in the story (as if, given the tone), everything felt like it worked together nicely.

Fourth, I love that my sense of orientation changes while reading. Time and place seem important when starting, but that all fades away and becomes irrelevant as surviving becomes the focal point.

Fifth, and not the least at all, the need for connection is always there, among the people, the dogs, and between the dogs and people. As much as I love CM's work, I've never felt that in any of his work. To get the overtones and colors from CM's work and meld that with humanity and connection? That right there is good stuff.

[Harve Lemelin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting if somewhat disturbing depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. The books is mixture of "Oryx and Crake" and "Swan's Song' peppered with terminology resembling Riddley Walker. If you are familiar with these novels and enjoyed them you will most likely enjoy "A Desolate Splendor". As noted by other reviewers, the apocalypse serves as the back-drop to this novel and very few clues are offered as to what events transpired prior to the novel. Having read works that similarly hint at a cataclysmic event, I don't find this lack of description particularly disturbing or off-putting. All and all this book is a good and intriguing post-apocalyptic novel.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The description for this book is very misleading - so misleading in fact, that I was completely lost for the first half of the book. The writing is beautiful and at times utterly disturbing, but I was confused most of the time waiting for the story to have some resemblance to the description. If the description would have matched the actual story, I very likely would not have read it. I reminded me of something I would have had to read for school and then pick apart the characters, plot line and all of the other literary elements therein.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given this book to read by my sister-in-law, who helped edit it. Reading the synopsis on the back of the book, I thought for sure I would fly through this one. It sounded so exciting and right up my alley. Instead, I struggled with this book.

After reading the first section, I thought it would be okay, even though the improper English used to simulate an accent started to drive me nuts. But moving onto part two, I found myself constantly questioning what was happening and by the end of the book, I still had a lot of unanswered questions. Who were the sadistic ex-soldiers? Was it the group of men you meet in part two, or was it the Reds and Echoes constantly mentioned? What happened to the world?

I found this book to be confusing. It jumped between so many characters point of views that sometimes it was hard to distinguish one character from the next. I’m not entirely sure what was going on at all and I don’t think I’d recommend this book.

[Chandni · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Wow. This was a book unlike any other I've read and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. When I first read the premise of this novel, I thought it was going to be heavily post-apocalyptic but it wasn't. Whatever event occurred to return man to a time of technological infancy was used as a background event, not as a main plot device.

This novel switches between the point of view of a few different sets of characters that are interconnected. I really like that narration style when it's done well, and I thought it was executed beautifully in this novel. The main problem I had with this novel was with the writing style. It didn't bother me that the dialogue had no quotation marks, but the "hick-speak" was really tiring to read and understand. I realize that it's necessary to the story, but it's hard to adjust to. Personally, that style of language isn't something I enjoy and it often turns me off to the story.

Another issue I had with the novel was that very little happens. I thought that due to the post-apocalyptic setting there was going to be a lot of danger the characters would need to face, but there's just a general lawlessness in the novel that caused the characters to do horrible, reprehensible things to each other. This book is intensely graphic in some of the scenes and I found myself physically repulsed. However, it's rare for a book to elicit such a visceral response in me, so I have to applaud John Jantunen for being able to write so well. This book reminds me of a darker, edgier, and more dangerous version of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, another Canadian post-apocalyptic novel.

I thought the characters were written well and you learned to understand them and their motivations, but I never fully connected with any of them. Perhaps it was because their style of talking and living was so different than mine, but I ended up feeling indifferent to the the majority of the characters. The only exception was the young boy, whom I at least felt some compassion for.

I was expecting a lot from this novel, and while I was slightly let down by some things, I enjoyed its dark and intense atmosphere. Whether you love it or hate it, it's a book that will stay with the reader. It'll make an impact and the reader will be left thinking about it for years to come. I know I will.

I received a review copy of this novel from ECW Press. This has not affected my review in any way.

[Lori L (She Treads Softly) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Desolate Splendor by John Jantunen is a so-so survival tale told in a western patois.

The opening has a band of some kind of child warrior/savages accompanied by dogs arriving at the front door of a rural homestead. Then the narrative switches to a different homestead, with Pa, Ma, the boy, and their pack of hounds. Then the narrative switches to two different groups, at which point some plot begins to take a vague shape and form as it jumps between the groups of people. Touted as a post-apocalyptic novel, you aren't going to really know/understand this right away. It could just as easily be historical fiction or alternate history from the dialect of the characters and the rural life they are living.

The collapse of civilization, the apocalypse, and really most of the description of the novel are spoiler-ish. I'm of two minds over this novel. There is no question that Jantunen is technically a good writer and had a plan for this story. I'm just not sure the story, as it is told, is successful for me. The description is what kept me reading past my usual cut-off for a novel that isn't working for me. I kept thinking it would get better. It is a dark, violent tale of survival and brutality. There is no real explanation of what happened and why the unnamed event turned the clock and the vernacular language of the characters back to reflecting a rural western language pattern. And to be honest, this dialect quickly became tiring and then annoying for me. It is also worth noting that there are no quotation marks to denote dialogue.

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.

[Jenee Rager · Rating 1 out of 5]

The blurb on the back of the book was such an exciting premise. I was more excited to read this book than any of the goodreads books I've won in quite awhile. Unfortunately, the book itself failed to live up to expectations. The whole thing was a disjointed mess. We skipped around from character to character without rhyme or reason, and style of writing was hard enough to follow. There general rules of punctuation and speech are thrown completely out of the window, and I found myself rereading the same passages over and over again to try and figure out what was going on. I was so glad to reach the end, because it was not a good read at all for me.

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me a few days to figure out how I felt about this: the writing is good, if a bit more descriptive than it needed to be in some parts, especially those that were pointlessly violent and/or bloody (the deer in the waterfall had no real bearing on the story and didn't need multiple paragraphs for description). I'm glad the story came together at the end, although I would have felt more interest if the pieces had started tying together sooner. Frankly, the only reason I finished it was to find out if the crew of a-holes was destroyed.

[Jeri]

DNF. I got halfway through this book and felt lost as to what was going on. The language of the Pa and the boy aggravated me.