Glory Days

August 1, 2017
Out on the Nebraska plains, it's hard to make a living. Ranching is a dying endeavor, and cattlemen like Teensy are an endangered breed. In the town of Ingleside, hope is dangled like a shiny penny in the form of Glory Days, a theme park that will allegedly bring tourists to this otherwise unlikely destination. Some ranchers sell out, ceding their heritage for a quick buck and pitting them against traditionalists like Teensy, who hold out and hold on. Fraterrigo (The Longest Pregnancy, 2006) deftly explores this dichotomy through the interconnected tales of Teensy; his daughter, Luann; Footer, the violent drifter; and Gardner, a decrepit land baron. At the intersection where wealth gives way to despair, and opportunity succumbs to outrage, the characters lose themselves in a nightmarish reality they can never escape. If Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy had a love child, she would be a writer such as Fraterrigo, whose imagery is equally evocative and unforgiving and whose characters are every bit as anguished and forlorn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2017

In this novel-in-stories from Lafayette Writers' Studio founder/director Fraterrigo (The Longest Pregnancy), Ingleside, NE, is suffering the fate of many small plains towns, with farms failing and the rich getting richer by buying up the land. Teensy has it worse, for he's compelled to auction off land and possessions even as he mourns his wife's death. In the opening story, daughter Luann, having been admonished by her mother to look after her father, runs after him one night as he looks for the ghost of his wife, convinced she'll return to berate him for losing her people's land. Yes, a ghost, for along with the down-and-dirty details of farm life--herding cows, scaring off wild dogs, and burning the carcasses of animals lost to a tornado--Fraterrigo occasionally folds in supernatural detail with such ease that they seem utterly ordinary. (In one riveting scene, Fredonia the Great, who works at the Glory Days amusement park and with a laying on of hands can describe how people will die, foretells her husband's death in dark and beautiful prose.) Throughout, Teensy stays upright as his life swings down into further tragedy. VERDICT Astonishing writing about a world that deserves greater attention in contemporary literature.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.