RECENTLY PUBLISHED: AUTHOR : AUTHOR :
Forty Rod Road
Grove N. Mower ’76
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform / 2015
REVIEWED BY:
Jessica Day
INTRODUCING HANK CHANDLER : flawed, fumbling, and about to fail out of college at the end of his freshman year. Hank accepts a job at a Wyoming ranch not far from where his best friend, Luke, died the previous year. Hank has lots of reasons for wanting to avoid a summer at home with his parents in suburban Chicago, not the least of which is the troubling need to find out just exactly what led to the accident that caused Luke’s death… Sometimes heart-wrenching and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Grove Mower’s debut novel is entertaining from start to finish, and like any good story, Forty Rod Road transports the reader to a different time and place—in this case 1977 and the dusty ranch owned by genuine cowboy Buzz Stifel and his wife Hope. They are hard-working, good people, but everybody has their secrets and faults, and Hank soon learns the Stifels are no exception; grudges, infidelity, and barroom brawls all muddy the waters as Hank discovers ranch life, for better or worse, isn’t quite as he imagined it.
Some of Forty Rod Road was inspired by Mr. Mower’s own experiences— such as the fact he, too, spent the summer between his freshman and sophomore years in college working on a ranch in Wyoming. It was a time he has described as a “leap from innocence to experience”—which also sums up Hank Chandler’s experience. In many ways, Forty Rod Road is a classic coming-of-age story, but it is in part Mr. Mower’s unique perspective that keeps this story from becoming cliché. That, and memorable chapters such as: “Farm Animals, Milking a Cow, the Outhouse, Tobacco.” At 175 pages, Forty Rod Road might be a quick read, but it’s the kind of story that stays with you for a while, thanks to a lively first-person narration, a cast of memorable characters, and Mr. Mower’s sharp wit. For those interested in “what happens next,” Mr. Mower is currently writing two sequels: his second book picks up where Forty Rod Road ended, and the third in the trilogy features Hank Chandler seven years down the road. //
EXCERPT:
running along a ten-foot hallway that Clete and I drove back to the house and had lots of ranch clothing hanging up or lugged my gear across the yard, over a just stuffed inside. A small bathroom, plank that had been laid across the with no door, was dirty and useless small ditch, to the green trailer that was to be my home away from home. because the sink, vanity and toilet had Inside, Clete kicked away boxes of clothes been ripped out and boarded over. Salt and got me set up on a thick bed of saddle licks were stacked in the tub, collecting blankets, then said to meet him in the dust. In the front where I was to sleep house as soon as I got settled in. (He were those boxes of clothes, the cracked later gave me one of his pillows after vanity from the bathroom and a makeHope washed the cover. She also gave shift workbench, below one of the two me an old lamp to read by. Compared to windows, where Clete re-loaded his dorm life this really wasn’t going to be shells for his Smith & Wesson. If my all that different, except here I could parents’ housekeeper, Verna, could have seen this place, she would have quit; if pee right outside.) I nosed around the trailer like a dog my mother and father knew where I inspecting a house for the first time. It was to sleep, I’m positive they would have was a beat-up abortion, with a sagging recalled me. That made me smile as I ran double bed (Clete’s) in the back bed- my finger along the grimy windowpane. room and a bunch of built-in closets
58 | THE COMMON ROOM