Reviews for Q Road

The average rating for Q Road based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-27 00:00:00 Robbie Grant 4.5★ Once Upon a River is on my favorites shelf and a prequel to Q Road, though written after the fact. Lead protagonist Margo only appears here in flashbacks as this one is about daughter Rachel after Margo has disappeared. Except for those flashbacks, the entire story takes place on one particular day and is told from multiple perspectives by residents in Greenland Township, Michigan. Many of whom define quirky and say or do unexpected things that surprise, sometimes shock you. Take Nicole for instance. "The words pulled Nicole from a dream of driving over her husband's body on the concrete floor of their two car garage, of then backing up and running over him a second time. The last month, she'd been entertaining ever more violent thoughts of killing Steve, but this was the first time she'd actually dreamed it. She tried to soothe away the image of his twisted limbs and mashed internal organs by considering the wholesome brilliance of her wedding day, 18 months ago, a sparkling day which, surely, no other in her life would ever compare." And husband Steve? He usually preferred "dealing with women over 40 or 50, women who wore little or no makeup, women whose houses were not too clean. Such women usually have an easier way about them, weren't anxious or excessive the way young women could be, the way his Nicole sometimes was." Then there's Henrietta. "For the first decades of her marriage, she tried not to remind Harold too often that she knew a great deal more than he did about a great many things…Henrietta had not always been a hard woman, but in the last thirty years of her life she found herself growing hard in response to her husband growing soft…and could not understand how her husband had come to defend everybody against every unkind word, as though he were Jesus Christ. While a woman might love Jesus well enough, only a naive girl would want to be married to Him." A major event is befalling the town on this particular present day where past and future are waging a battle for the land. Rachel is caught in the middle cussing and shooting her way through as she fights for a way of life that only she seems to think is worth living for and preserving to the exclusion of everything and everyone else . . . almost. "But even she wasn't strong enough to resist the inevitable indefinitely. Today, even Rachel would have to see that no matter how tightly you held on to a place, it would eventually slip away." What or to whom will she cling to if it passes? "This was not love as Rachel had imagined it might feel'this was an emotion as complicated as a garden, beneath the surface of which roots stretched in all directions to fill a fertile square mile. This was like the fusing of skin and dirt, the coming together of mineral and muscle, something like eternity sped up so that the decay of bones and calcium-rich grit occurred in fast motion." Based on my verbose quoting it's obvious I love her characters and writing. I always find myself in her pages somewhere between the lines.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-22 00:00:00 Janet Salee (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I recently found myself with the opportunity to interview revered author Bonnie Jo Campbell for the CCLaP Podcast; and so before doing so, I thought it would be beneficial to read her two most popular books besides the one I've already read (2011's Once Upon a River, that is, considered by many to be a frontrunner for this year's Pulitzer). And indeed, it turned out to be quite important that I read her 1999 breakout novel Q Road before talking with her, because it turns out to be a clever sort of prequel/sequel to the Once Upon a River title we'll mainly be discussing; set on the cusp of the new millennium, it tells the story of the "last hurrah" of sorts for a rural farmland area just outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan before finally succumbing to the capitalist steamroller of exurban subdivisions, chain restaurants and pristine golf courses, an Altmanesque interrelated ensemble character piece in which one of the characters (teenage tomboy and child bride Rachel Crane) just happens to be the daughter of the main character of Once Upon a River (the even more hardcore tomboy Margo Crane), only with the newer novel set in the older 1970s and examining Margo's own teenage years as a tight-lipped, sharpshooting pregnant runaway. And in fact you can look at all three of these books in much the same light (including the slim 2009 story collection American Salvage, the third title in this list); they are all episodic in nature, take a sympathetic and nonjudgemental look at the kinds of characters we would traditionally call dumb white trash, yet can frequently reach a level of poetic harshness and violence akin to a Sam Shepard play, stories that don't excuse the behavior of the meth addicts, racists and uneducated hillbillies that populate her universe but that don't dismiss such characters either, an attitude that I'm sure at least partly stems from Campbell's own background as a willful tomboy in this exact kind of rural Michigan environment (but more on that in the finished podcast episode, coming next week). Powerful and unflinching, yet beautiful and easily readable, it's no surprise after reading these three books that Campbell would have the kind of intensely passionate fanbase that she does, as well as racking up such academic tentpoles as a Pushcart Prize, Eudora Welty Prize, National Book Award nomination and National Book Critics Circle Award nomination; and I wholeheartedly recommend them all to a general audience. Out of 10: Q Road: 9.4 American Salvage: 9.0