Right after high school, Joe Goffman left sleepy Bush Falls, Connecticut and never looked back. Then he wrote a novel savaging everything in town, a novel that became a national bestseller and a huge hit movie. Fifteen years later, Joe is struggling to avoid the sophomore slump with his next novel when he gets a call: his father's had a stroke, so it's back to Bush Falls for the town's most famous pariah. His brother avoids him, his former classmates beat him up, and the members of the book club just hurl their copies of Bush Falls at his house. But with the help of some old friends, Joe discovers that coming home isn't all bad--and that maybe the best things in life are second chances.
This book had the typical plot line of a person that hasn’t
been to their hometown in awhile. They have to go back for a tragic reason, and
they end up rediscovering themselves.
Now, just because this has been done quite a few times, it
doesn’t mean that the book was boring. Quite the opposite, really. It took me a
few chapters to really get into the book, but once I hit that point, I didn’t
want to put it down.
It is hard to talk about the book without talking about
everything that happened to Joe when he went back to his hometown.
Without revealing anything, I will say that the characters
were all very interesting. They were all so DIFFERENT. Commonly, you will find
some background characters blending in with each other. But each character in
this one had their own personality, and it was a very character driven novel.
As I said, the plot has been done many times before. The characters are what
set this book apart from the others.
It also tackles many tough topics: homophobia, suicide,
death, and many more.
4/5 Stars
Memorable Quotes: “Everyone always wants to know how you can
tell when it’s true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn’t fade
and the scars don’t heal, and it’s too damned late.”
“When you’re eighteen, time isn’t nearly as crotchety and
relentless as it becomes soon thereafter, and eight months is nothing less than
a lifetime.”
“It’s almost like they knew it would never get any better
for them than it was right there. And for me, it was the time I spent with you.
And for the last seventeen years, that time was the ball in my trophy case that
I could look at every day and find some measure of comfort, of happiness
remembered.”
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