The Road Home

April 26, 2010
In this gentle coming-of-middle-age tale, Ford (Last Summer) follows a gay Boston photographer recuperating at his father’s smalltown Vermont home, where he’s drawn into an eerie Civil War mystery. Following a car accident that shattered his leg, 40-year-old Burke Crenshaw is less than happy to find himself in his childhood bedroom (still sporting a Raiders of the Lost Ark movie poster) for six weeks, tended to by his father, Ed, and Ed’s girlfriend, Lucy. Resentful of his country convalescence and feeling restless, Burke finds relief in a photography project inspired by Lucy’s deceased husband’s book on Vermont’s Civil War militias. Fascinated by the love letter of soldier Amos Hague, Burke launches a quest to uncover the truth about the infantryman and his fiancé, with assistance from a witty smalltown librarian and the 20-year-old son of an old high school crush. Though Ford fails to follow through on a promising supernatural twist, he crafts an involving if low-key slice-of-life narrative about the importance of being true to one’s self.

June 1, 2010
After sustaining injuries in a car accident, Burke returns to the family farm in Vermont where he is touched by the sight of memorabilia from his horsey, 4-H childhood, and feels the press of time. What he thinks is a photograph of Marshall, his high-school friend and first same-sex encounter, is actually of Marshalls 20-year-old son. Burkes father, whose traditional values contradict his sinful life with his widowed girlfriend, Lucy, still feels resentment that Burke threw away a teaching career for the life of an artist, left Vermont, and became a Boston photographer. Reticence defines this father-son relationship since discussing their personal lives was not something the Crenshaw men did. Particularly when one of them was having relationships with other men. Still, the old guy digs out his own fathers camera equipment for Burke, who is inspired by the rare Hasselblad 1600f to rise from his sick bed, and crutch-hop downstairs on his way to new beginnings in this midlife coming-of-age novel that is both piercingly accurate and sweetly hopeful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)