Review: Homecoming by John Strother

 Genre: Satire/Humor, according to the author

Description:

Smoke, Ink, Cowboy, and Dusty step into the hallways of Trails End High School and are “accused of trampling time honored [sic] traditions like they were the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

Author:

John Strother “loves a good book, whether fact of [sic] fiction. Hemingway, Faulkner, Boorstin, Roth, Tolstoy, McCullough, Keillor, McCarthy, Wodehouse. Always an eye out for another great author to follow.” – Sure John, Osamu Dazai.

Appraisal:

Elmore Leonard said, readers don’t skip dialog. If that’s true, there’s precious little to skip in Homecoming. It’s about ninety percent dialog and much of that in the colorful patois of East Texas, which plays well into the humor-laced conversations.

While the dialog is fun, characters and relationships are thinly layered, and the plot could have been lifted from any B-movie raucous teen romp. A locally unwelcomed corporation opens a site in Texas piney woods. Four boys, whose parents relocate, start their school career as outcasts. Such de rigueur characters as a bullying coach, irreverent mentor, and an outlaw girl with a kind heart provide adversity or support. The boys get into assorted bits of trouble and come through fine. The coach gets his comeuppance, but it is so jarringly vile as to sour the book’s otherwise light-hearted flavor.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

In addition to humor/satire, I would put the novel in the YA genre.

Format/Typo Issues:

Multitude of errors, as evidenced in both the book and author descriptions on Amazon as of this writing.

Rating: *** Three Stars

Reviewed by: Sam Waite

Approximate word count: 50-55,000 words