Where the Dead Sit Talking

November 15, 2017

Pushcart Prize winner Hobson's (Desolation of Avenues Untold) latest is a coming-of-age story set in rural Oklahoma in 1989. The story is recalled by Sequoya, a 15-year-old Cherokee who had a difficult childhood. With his mother in jail, he moves in with Harold and Agnes Troutt and their two other foster children, George, a 13-year-old aspiring novelist, and Rosemary, a 17-year-old fellow Native American and artist with her own unpleasant past. As Sequoya tries to adjust to his new surroundings, he and Rosemary bond as they share their troubled histories, darkest secrets, and premonitions about the future. Readers are told early on that Rosemary has died but are left in the dark as to the cause until the end. Hobson's grim portrait of rural America is filled with unsavory characters who attempt to derail Sequoya's adolescence, as well as those pushing to get him through. VERDICT Though the characters could have been more compellingly drawn and the conclusion is somewhat anticlimactic, Hobson's eloquent prose and story line will keep literary and general fiction readers turning the pages. Its teen protagonists offer interest for young adults. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/17.]--David Miller, Farmville P.L. Admin. NC

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 11, 2017
The latest from Hobson (Deep Ellum) is a smart, dark novel of adolescence, death, and rural secrets set in late-1980s Oklahoma. After his mother is jailed for drug charges, 15-year-old Sequoyah becomes the foster child of Harold and Agnes Troutt, a middle-aged couple already fostering 13-year-old George and 17-year-old Rosemary. Sequoyah shares a bedroom with the quirky George, who sleepwalks and sometimes communicates via handwritten notes, and bonds with Rosemary over their shared Native American heritages—he is Cherokee, she Kiowa. As the pair grows close, Sequoyah falls for Rosemary’s charm and fantasizes about both hurting and becoming his foster sister (“We shared no physical attraction but something else, something deeper. I saw myself in her.”), who has a history of self-harm. Sequoyah also learns of Harold’s illegal sports bookie business from his foster siblings, and the lure of Harold’s hidden sacks of rolled hundred-dollar bills, tucked safely in a backyard shed, tempt all three children with the possibility for trouble, excess, and freedom, which drives the novel’s second half. Hobson’s narrative control is stunning, carrying the reader through scenes and timelines with verbal grace and sparse detail. Far more than a mere coming-of-age story, this is a remarkable and moving novel.

A man looks back on 1989, the year he was 15, when he was living in a foster home and a girl who was also living there died in front of him.That's no spoiler: Sequoyah tells us about Rosemary's death within three sentences of the start of his tale. "I have been unhappy for many years now," he begins, then tells the story of how his mother went to jail on a drug charge and, after a stint at a shelter, he wound up living with the Troutts, Harold and Agnes, and their two other foster kids, the eccentric George, 13, who was prone to sleepwalking, and 17-year-old Rosemary, who shared Sequoyah's Native American heritage and liked to talk about death. They lived in rural Oklahoma, and the quiet suited them all; the Troutts were kind people, and everyone in the house liked to be by themselves a lot, with Agnes going for drives, Harold napping in the basement where he surprisingly ran an illegal bookie shop, George lying on his bed meditating, and Rosemary heading to the woods with a drawing pad. Sequoyah used to get in trouble at the shelter for slipping out at night to take walks, so he fit right into this house full of secrets and relative freedom. Hobson (Desolation of Avenues Untold, 2015, etc.) writes in a spare, even tone, and no matter what Sequoyah says--even when it's about feeling dead inside, or about wanting to hurt someone--the reader is with him, empathizing. As in a Shirley Jackson story, everything seems perfectly ordinary until it doesn't. "Why did the entire town seem to have the same strange habits?" Sequoyah wonders. Hobson is in masterly control of his material, letting Sequoyah relax into the welcoming Troutt family home while glimpsing the menace behind the curtain. Or is the menace just inside him?A masterly tale of life and death, hopes and fears, secrets and lies.

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December 15, 2017
Hobson's poignant and disturbing coming-of-age story is told through the eyes of Sequoyah, a 15-year-old Cherokee boy. He never knew his father, his mother is in prison for repeated drunk-driving offenses, and his social worker has finally found him a foster home with the Troutt family outside of Tulsa. The Troutts have two other foster children: George, perhaps autistic, who tells Sequoyah that he keeps thinking about death; and Rosemary, a 17-year-old Native American with whom Sequoyah feels an instant bond. Hobson relates this tale of a year or so in the lives of these and numerous peripheral characters in a series of surreal scenes which leave the reader with a constant feeling of dread, which is increased by Rosemary's dark obsession. Scenes in the present are interspersed with those from Sequoyah's heartbreaking past: months spent in shelters, in other foster homes, and once in a detention center, a place full of guys who liked to bully kids. Hobson presents a painfully visceral drama about the overlooked lives of those struggling on the periphery of mainstream society.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)