In it, you will find the beginning of an epic journey of youth, one with unlikely events that may take you back to both happier and more troubling times. The novel takes place in the year , when the protagonist and narrator, year-old Robert English, is attending college in the town of his boyhood.
He has decided to stay on campus in the summer semester after his sophomore year rather return to his Stone Mountain, Ga. Through of series of seemingly meant-to-be occurrences he ends up house-sitting for a professor who is leaving town for a summer trip to Europe.
He writes with the sort of comfortable pacing that effortlessly carries the reader from page to page. A solitary motion glowed over the hills and broke the tops of the trees. The air warmed up today and honeysuckle floated through the air. I smelled pine trees, too. I walked the dogs to the park across the street, then along the lake. But, as the reader will discover, not all is quiet in the mind of young Robert English. English is his own worst enemy, and you find yourself pulling both for and against him as this most unlikely story unfolds.
Still, some of those choices return to haunt him in very adult ways. About 50 pages into the story, a startling event takes place while English is out on a date with a girlfriend who had just failed her biology class. A man and a woman were sitting on the front porch in rocking chairs looking out over the lake, but except for them, we were the only people around and the only sound was the lapping of water against the shore.
Open and to the end of the Vietnam War. You will also find references to Atlanta, including Lenox Square, the Atlanta Braves and one particularly troubling passage which took place at Stone Mountain Park.
