Genre: Coming-of-Age,
Contemporary Fiction
Description:
“In 2004, when middle-aged Walker Maguire is called to the deathbed of
his estranged father, his thoughts return to 1974. He'd worked that summer at
the auto factory where his dad, an unhappily retired Air Force colonel, was
employed as plant physician. Witness to a bloody fight falsely blamed on a
Mexican immigrant, Walker kept quiet, fearing his white co-workers and
tyrannical father. Lies snowball into betrayals, leading to a life-long rift
between father and son that can only be mended by the past coming back to life
and revealing its long-held secrets. You Can See More From Up Here is a
coming-of-age tale about the illusion of privilege and the power of the past to
inform and possibly heal the present.”
Author:
“Mark Guerin is a 2014 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator
program in Boston. He also has an MFA from Brandeis University and is a winner
of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, the Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting and
Sigma Tau Delta's Eleanor B. North Poetry Award. A contributor to the
novelist’s blog, Dead Darlings, he is also a playwright, copywriter and
journalist. He currently resides in Harpswell, Maine, with his wife, Carol, and
two Brittany Spaniels.”
Appraisal:
This book is interesting. As I see it, a coming-of-age story appeals
to people for a number of reasons. One is that a coming-of-age story typically has
the protagonist going through a difficult situation and we like to root for them
to bring the situation to a happy resolution. We feel good about that. It can
also be thought provoking as we compare situations like this we’ve been in or,
if we’ve never experienced anything quite like this, we can consider how we think
we’d react if we found ourselves in the same kind of spot. I find myself on
edge, like a good mystery, as the story unfolds and I wonder how the
protagonist is going to resolve the issue, hoping the find their way to a happy
solution.
This story has all those things that you’d expect in a coming-of-age story,
but twice. It’s like the protagonist is coming of age twice at the same time.
The contemporary story line has the protagonist, Walker, back in his hometown
for the first time in many years and his estranged father in the hospital on
his deathbed. Walker is trying to come to terms with a situation that played
out thirty years ago that ended with him leaving town and severing ties with
his dad. As he’s working through things in the current day, we get one coming-of-age
thread that is especially unique for the advanced age of the protagonist going
through the crisis. But as he is thinking things through, he remembers the
sequence of events that led to his exit thirty years ago, which gives us another
coming-of-age story thread that is more in tune with the norm, at least in
terms of the age of the protagonist.
I found this story to be engrossing, not only because I enjoy a good
coming-of-age story, but also because I could relate to a person of a certain
age looking back on difficult life choices and evaluating them, not only in
terms of whether they made sense at the time, but also on the results that have
come as a consequence of them. It was an entertaining and thought-provoking
story that had me wondering what the ultimate resolution was going to be right
up to the end.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Some adult language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
A small number of proofreading errors and misses.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 130-135,000 words
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