The School on Heart's Content Road
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book: A group forms its own surrogate family on the margins of society in this novel by the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine.
Mickey Gammon, fifteen, has dropped out of school and been kicked out of his home. But he has found a new place in the Settlement—a rural cooperative that deals in alternative energy, farm produce, and locally made goods. Run by “The Prophet,” the Settlement is demonized by the media as a compound of sin, but its true nature remains foreign to outsiders.
It is here where Mickey meets another deserted child, six-year-old Jane, whose mother is in jail on trumped-up drug charges. Playing “secret agent,” Jane cunningly prowls the Settlement in her heart-shaped sunglasses, imagining that her plans to bring down the community will reunite her with her mother. As they struggle to adjust to their new, complex surrogate family, Mickey and Jane are about to witness mounting unrest within the Settlement’s ranks—which soon builds to a shocking and devastating crescendo.
The School on Heart’s Content Road is “a profoundly human novel . . . Absolutely one of a kind” (USA Today), from an author who, “like Flannery O’Connor . . . has a gift for expressing the true spirit of a culture” (San Francisco Chronicle).
“Chute can’t help but create characters who live and breathe.” —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chute, author of the acclaimed The Beans of Egypt, Maine, returns to Egypt with an emotional but uneven novel portraying the St. Onge Settlement, a rural co-op community led by the mythic, flawed, Gordon St. Onge, hero of the downtrodden who people the Settlement along with Gordon's wives and children. Through her distinctive, muscular prose and vivid depictions of Maine's resilient residents, Chute revisits familiar themes: the government's injustices toward the poor, restrictive gun legislation, faults in the education system and the evils of corporations. The novel also defends and demystifies the militia movement (Chute is involved with the 2nd Maine Militia, a grassroots organization advocating for the working class). The narrative, fractured with a multitude of perspectives, jumps between Gordon, Richard "Rex" York, head of the local militia, and Settlement kids Mickey Gammon, 15, and precocious six-year-old Jane Meserve, whose mother is incarcerated on spurious drug charges. By turns inspiring, then preachy, Chute, who in the acknowledgments says there are five completed novels about the Settlement, which might explain the unresolved story lines, has an undeniable talent for depicting humanity at its most impassioned and impoverished.
