This tale of young men growing up in a working-class Michigan town without fathers to guide them is “melancholy, surreal, and funny all at once” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).
The summer Michael turns seventeen, his father disappears. One by one, other men also vanish from the blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit where their fathers before them had lived, raised families, and—in a more promising era—worked. One props open the door to his shoe store and leaves a note: “I’m going to the moon,” it reads. “I took the cash.” The wives left behind drink, brawl, and sleep around, gradually settling down to make new lives. And Michael and his friends, stuck in the place where they have been abandoned, stumble through their twenties—until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away . . .
With “echoes of Alice Hoffman’s magic realism” (Booklist), this is a novel suffused with both humor and longing, by an author who has “considerable talent for capturing young-male ennui” (Entertainment Weekly).
