Synopses & Reviews
Tenaya has never left the Valley. He was born in a car by the Merced River, and grew up in a hidden camp with his parents, surviving on fish, acorns, and unfinished food thrown away by the park's millions of tourists. But despite its splendor, Tenaya's Yosemite is a visceral place of opposites, at once beautiful, dangerous, and violent. When he meets Lucy, a young woman from the south side of the park, Tenaya must choose between this new relationship and the Valley, terrorism and legend, the sacred versus the material.
In this stunning debut novel, the Yosemite Valley becomes the object of a graphic world where mythical strength, worldly greed, love, lust, and epic destruction come together.
Review
"This fascinating novel is both an outsider's coming-of-age story...and a deeper meditation on the beauty of the wild world...the images, sometimes mythic...are unforgettable....Passionately conceived, arrestingly original, this will be life changing for some readers."
Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Peter Brown Hoffmeister knows landscapes and bear scat and mountain lions and native legends, the interiors of hitchhiker cars. He is also a man who is inventing language, whose words bring to mind James Joyce. In Graphic the Valley, he gives us a possession story and an anti-possession story, a tale about control. Tenaya — a young man without so much as a birth certificate, a young man who has never left the valley and yet has no rights in it — must find a way to save what he loves. And Hoffmeister makes us eager to find out. He's an exceptional writer, this Hoffmeister, but he's not an easy one. Easy doesn't interest him. And I am glad for that."
Beth Kephart, National Book Award finalist
Review
"In Peter Brown Hoffmeister's Graphic the Valley, you'll enter the life of Yosemite's 'other' visitors, the nomadic climbers and rootless drifters, fed by dreams, a wish to escape, or a native's desire to never leave his ancestral home. Hoffmeister's intimate knowledge of this place, this way of life, pulls you in, ensnares you in the struggle to protect Yosemite from itself. But, more than that, you'll live with these people, feel the exhilaration of new love, the crushing pain of its loss, become a young man searching for who he is, all amid the valleys, domes and rivers of one of the world's most beautiful places."
Pete Fromm, author of Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness
Review
"Peter Hoffmeister is as ambitious as he is original. Graphic the Valley is many things at once: an ode to a place, a romance, a family drama, and a cautionary tale. From page one, it will surprise you. By the end, it will leave you surprisingly moved."
Miriam Gershow, author of The Local News
About the Author
Peter Hoffmeister is the author of Let Them Be Eaten by Bears: A Fearless Guide to Taking Young People Into the Outdoors (Perigee, 2013) and his memoir The End of Boys (Soft Skull, 2010), and is a writer for the Huffington Post, Climbing Magazine, Rock and Ice Magazine, Gripped Magazine, among others. His fiction collection, Loss, won the 2006 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, and his essay, "How to Break Up With Your Climbing Partner", won the Rock and Ice National Bloggers' Brawl. He's been rock climbing in Yosemite for the past decade, and is a dirtbag, raft guide, teacher, and survivalist.