Out Backward
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Sam Marsdyke is a lonely young man, dogged by an incident in his past and forced to work his family farm instead of attending school in his Yorkshire village. He methodically fills his life with daily routines and adheres to strict boundaries that keep him at a remove from the townspeople. But one day he spies Josephine, his new neighbor from London. From that moment on, Sam's carefully constructed protections begin to crumble—and what starts off as a harmless friendship between an isolated loner and a defiant teenage girl takes a most disturbing turn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this creepy, lyrical debut, Raisin explores the fine line between sanity and insanity with Sam Marsdyke, an awkward late teenager who was thrown out of school after being accused of attempting to rape a schoolmate. Sam now works his family's farm along with his father, and there he notices Josephine Reeves, a 15-year-old whose family has moved from London to the Yorkshire village where Sam resides. After an inauspicious beginning, Sam and Josephine strike up a friendship that culminates with them running away together. Soon, Sam's tenuous grip on reality slips, giving the reader a frightening glimpse into the mind of a psychopath. What happens next will shock readers, yet compel them to read faster to learn the outcome. Although the author's liberal use of the Yorkshire dialect and a stream-of-consciousness narration ("Sackless article the wether kept indoors, as Father went and in the pen and fastened the tupping harness around the ram's neck, and the gate was unsnecked"), it's true to the protagonists roots and lends an air of authority to this tightly plotted and disturbing effort.
