Not believable, but reassuring to readers turning quiveringly away from real life in search of a bit of respite. Or perhaps like Alcott’s Little Men, where a little love is enough to wipe away the mostly deeply embedded trauma. It’s all very Walton-esque – one can well imagine John-boy being just such a lad had he ever ended up in a work farm. The exception is Duchess, who is occasionally startlingly violent, but always for excellent, generous reasons.
They all put each other above themselves, never behave inappropriately in front of eight-year-old Billy, and rarely do anything much that rises above the level of endearing naughtiness. Here, the three boys from the work farm are all good-hearted, kind and generous – the problems that led them there all arising as a result of useless, though not intentionally cruel, parenting. He gets away with this partly because of the quality of the writing, partly because he sets his novels in the past, and partly because he creates a kind of fairy tale atmosphere, where this reader at least can happily put her disbelief to one side for a while and simply enjoy the story. His characters rarely ring fully true, but they have that quality of the heroes and heroines of olden times, when we seemed able to accept people as wholly good in a way that feels rather out of place now in contemporary fiction. He has moments of beauty, moments of humour, occasional shafts of intriguing insight into history or literature or human nature, and he creates lovely characters. So the four boys set off on a journey, following the Lincoln Highway first east to New York, and then planning to drive from there west, all the way to the other coast… They have a different plan of where they want to go, and they want to persuade Emmett to come along. And then two boys from the work farm show up, Duchess and Woolly, having hidden in the boot of the car that brought Emmett home.
But Billy wants to go to California since he has found some postcards from their mother, suggesting that’s where she headed when she abandoned them long ago.
Emmett was never keen on farming anyway, so he intends to take Billy to Texas and start a new life there. While he was inside, Emmett’s father died and the bank has foreclosed on the mortgage on their Nebraskan farm, so now Emmett is left with only his car and $3,000 dollars his father has hidden for him away from the bank’s clutches, and his younger brother Billy to care for. And then you go and spoil it all… 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂Įmmett Watson has just been released from the juvenile work farm where he has spent eighteen months after accidentally killing another boy in a fight.
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