9781400062690If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to read truly great books than I have a book that will keep you from breaking that resolution after the first week. It’s an unusual but extremely satisfying read.  The novel is Against the Country by Ben Melcalf.

The debut novel has a sole narrator who tells the story of his life growing up in Goochland a small country town in the US. His family decides to move there because his father feels like it will best for his family to have the experience of growing up in a small country town.  The narrator hates everything about it including his abusive father.  He actually wears many pair of underpants so when his father beats him it won’t hurt as much. We hear stories about what it’s like to be a boy in small town America which most of us in the city think of as warm and fuzzy. There are some very touching scenes with being gay in the country and how they affect the narrator.  Trust me after reading this book you’ll want to pull any surviving member of your family living in the country and move them elsewhere. He leaves no one and I mean no one unscathed in his descriptions of country life and in fact anybody who lives in America (sorry city folks, you don’t get a pass). He even goes back to Thomas Jefferson and the mistakes he made.

This is not an easy read but once you get into it you’ll find yourself going back over sentences and be wondering how this could be a debut novel. The first half of the novel is just stunning with what it likes dealing with issues of trying to survive bullies in school and at home. The second half is where we get heavily into the relationship between the narrator and his abusive father. It’s a relationship where his father was abused and it just seems to be something the father wants to pass on to him. The boy expects his father to protect him and instead he abuses him to make him strong.  The result is it just ends up breaking his soul.

The final part of novel involves chickens – yes chickens – that the narrator is responsible for. Something happens where most of them are killed except for the last mean hen who has always been difficult. Is the last mean hen his father? Does what he makes happens with the leftover eggs from the slaughtered chickens signify that the violence ends here? It’s something that I hope after reading this review that you will want to find out. Trust me, keep your resolutions going strong and read Against the Country. Happy 2015 and to all the great books that will soon be published.