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American Odyssey
By Brian M. Gelinas
ISBN-10: 1598007556
ISBN-13: 978-1598007558
With his debut novel, American Odyssey, Brian Gelinas has succeeded in giving us a meaningful journey across America but never going far from his hometown of Athol, Massachusetts. Or my hometown of Prescott, Arkansas, for that matter. Brian has produced believable characters in Hunter Leroux, Billy Prescott and Wade Canter. The dialogue is believable and straight from the mouths of young and confused boys who are staring into the crevasse that separates the hopeless limbo of being a nobody in a dead end town from a purposeful manhood, facing life on one’s own terms. For a moment the limbo wins; the boys don’t know what to do other than run.
This book grabbed me in the heart because I understood where the boys were coming from and where they were headed. There were countless times in my own life I felt that I was or still am running from home when, in fact and just like Hunter and his friends, I was simply running from myself. Because of this I felt myself wishing someone else in the book could step in to stop them. As in real life there were loved ones who tried to talk sense to the young stallions, but Hunter chose not to listen to his brother or his girl cousin and settle himself. Gelinas’s book as also filled with ironies as through most of the book Hunter and Billy are running from a crime that Wade committed yet they didn’t know it. It is also ironic that what they were seeking, to see the buffalo on the plains of the Dakotas, was simply a distinctly American metaphor or youth.
And just as Homer’s Odyssey ends back home where it begins thus does Hunter Leroux’s own odyssey. And even though Hunter is alone to face the consequences of his run, he finds that he is not the only one in his town who struggled with his pervasive hopelessness. He finds that he really had no enemies other than himself in the first place.
And this is the point where Hunter’s journey is only now set to begin.
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