This is the affective story, written in a well representative almost bleak style, of seventeen year old Thomas Mahey. Thomas is from a small, blue-collar town in Kentucky, a place that is kept on the verge of disaster by high flood walls holding back the Ohio River. With naivety and optimism, simple truths, questions instead of answers, Thomas leaves town in the wee hours with his two new friends: Twenty-five year old, first year teacher, and his lover, Alice Lowe and the towns misfit vagabond, anarchist Shiloh Tanager. They embark on a road trip to rural Vermont where they move into an abandoned farmhouse and try to live off the land.

I loved the premise of the story, and I enjoyed the atmosphere the author created, even though it seemed as if the reader was purposefully kept as an outsider. I was surprised by the tenderness I felt toward Shiloh and how much I didn’t like, nor understand, the narrators affection for Alice Lowe. I loved the details of the story by way of the impressionable youth’s perspective. I loved how the mundane was given character, how what was for breakfast didn’t bore me, or how the plow driver was a dive instructor seemed somehow significant. All of these small things, though overwhelmingly trivial, really made the book a portrait of life. The small, the good, the big, the bad; things and people being both beautiful and disgusting at the same time.

I also liked that that a premise of a high school boy’s love affair with his teacher, running away, living of the land… it had the potential to be a bit tawdry and dramatic, a cliched coming of age story that you’ve read before. But it was never that. It was a snippet of lives, a moment when those three people, were The Best People in the World to each other. Although those moments don’t last forever, as some stories try to make them out to, it doesn’t make them less significant.

Within the novel, there were random, and in my opinion, completely unnecessary, flashes into characters investigating “miracles” for the Catholic Church. These pieces, as far as I can tell, were meant to give information about The Boy. But they were so sparse and unrelated to the actual story line, that I found them distracting. I was annoyed by being taken away from the story that so captivated me, with these inconsequential bits of information. This, I did not like, and could have done without.

Otherwise, a well told story, characters that I wasn’t exactly attached to but interested in, and a style that left me satisfied.