My sister slept with the light on until she was 27. She rightfully blames me. I would leap out of closets with my hands made into claws. I would...
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Yorick_The_Last, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by Yorick_The_Last)
Josh Ritter relies on his strengths and themes that he has honed as a talented singer-songwriter to make his first novel a true gem. I honestly cant think of a book with more beautiful imagery or lyrical prose. It may not have the challenging ideas or emotional impact to make it a truely great novel but it succeeds with distinction with what it tries to do. I already consider Josh Ritter to be the greatest songwriter of my generation, but if he gets much better at writing books he could be one of the greatest novelists of my generation as well.
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Product details
208 pages
The Dial Press -
English9781400069507
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"War is hell, and so is Henry Bright's homecoming from the trenches of WWI in songwriter Ritter's appropriately lyrical debut. Bright is a half-shattered veteran whose ordeal in combat continues with the death of his young wife in childbirth. Spurred on by an angel who speaks to him through his livestock, Henry torches the cabin where his wife died, using the family Bible to spark the blaze. Soon, the angel tells Henry his infant son is the Future King of Heaven, a replacement for the one 'who has soaked the world in blood.' Henry's desolation is believably crushing, sometimes darkly funny, and rendered with a lyricist's delicacy: against the backdrop of the forest fire sparked by the cabin's blaze, Henry, the child, horse, and a goat make their way to town, dodging his wife's psychotic family, who blame him for her death. 'The sky was too dark for afternoon, and where the sun should have hung there was now only an undulating black curtain of heat, which pulsed through the windowpanes upon his face like the throb of an open furnace.' As the fire threatens Bright's friends and enemies, Ritter evokes war, violence and the fearful and numb responses to trauma, squaring them up in a hopeful, humble revelation. (July)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
"Review A Day"
by Alice Gregory, NPR,
"When 35-year-old singer-songwriter Josh Ritter was in college at Oberlin in the mid-90s, he created his own major: 'American History Through Narrative Folk Music.' It was there, in pastoral Ohio, that he recorded his first album. Fifteen years later, he's writing not just songs but books, too, and whatever preoccupations were at play in that college thesis are still at work today. Bright's Passage, Ritter's debut novel, reads like a protracted folk song and features many of the form's perennial motifs: Biblical names, blazing fires, ghosts in white lace, a beatific baby." (Read the entire NPR review)
"Review"
by Wesley Stace, author of Misfortune and Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer,
"A perfect marriage of the miraculous and the mundane, Bright's Passage is itself something of a miracle. Combining the pull of a big ballad and the intimacy of a whispered monologue, it satisfies on every level: from its deceptively casual style and unexpected coinages to its astute psychology and emotional power. I imagine this is precisely the book every fan of Ritter's music wanted, but Bright's Passage is far more than that."
"Review"
by Robert Pinsky,
"An adventure story with the penetrating emotional colors of a fable; a myth-like survival quest with the convincing texture of a movie; a good read that stays in the memory."
"Review"
by Dennis Lehane,
"Josh Ritter is already one of the country's most accomplished songwriters. Based on the heartbreaking, luminous Bright's Passage, he may become one of our most accomplished novelists as well."
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