It's June of 1965 when Wrecker enters the world. The war is raging in Vietnam, San Francisco is tripping towards flower power, and Lisa Fay - a young innocent from a family farm down south - is knocked nearly sideways by life as a single mother in a city she could barely manage to navigate on her own. Three years later, she's alone again. Kids aren't allowed in prison. And Wrecker, scared silent, furious, and hell-bent on breaking every last thing that crosses his path, is shipped off to live with distant relatives in the wilds of Humboldt County. Raising Wrecker is the story of this nearly-broken boy whose presence turns a motley group of isolated eccentrics into a real family. Real enough to make mistakes. Real enough to stick together in spite of everything ready to tear them apart. There's no guidebook to mothering for Melody, who thought the best thing in life was eighty acres of old growth along the Mattole River and nobody telling her what to do - until this boy came along. For Melody, Len, Willow, Ruth, Meg and Johnnie Appleseed, life will never again be the same once Wrecker signs on. And for Lisa Fay, there's one thought keeping her alive through fifteen years of hard time: one day, she'll find her son and bring him home.
Raising Wrecker earned Summer Wood the 2007 Literary Gift of Freedom, from the A Room of Her Own (AROHO) Foundation. Her first novel, Arroyo, was published by Chronicle Books in 2001. She lives in New Mexico.
Title: Raising Wrecker
Author: Wood, Summer
ISBN: 9781408821961
Binding:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 2012-08-02
Number of Pages: 304
Weight: 0.1996 kg
A love song to well-intentioned, wholly dedicated, and deeply flawed motherhood ... Summer Wood creates more than just a great story, deftly, elegantly, and intricately told. She broadens both our notion of family, and our appreciation for whatever we call our own. Wrecker is a big-hearted, big-loving compassionate book * Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness *
Summer Wood's remarkable novel carves its way, sentence by gorgeous sentence, into the great complexity of love and family and community. Wood movingly evokes the insatiable hunger for home - for mother - that lost children often feel, and the courage and strength they must conjure as they forge new identities. Her dialogue is so natural and full we feel as though we are illicitly eavesdropping ... A stunning and impossibly generous, big-hearted novel * Meredith Hall, author of Without a Map *
A beautiful, big-hearted novel * Now Magazine *
A fascinating and compassionate book * Big Issue Cymru *