Frankie is 16 years old and a bit awkward. She doesn’t really fit in with the other kids at school. What she most loves to do is to write.
It’s summer holidays and Frankie and her three older triplet brothers are at the pool. She notices a ‘goofy’ boy across the other side of the pool. His name is Zeke and he has just moved to Frankie’s small town of Coalfield. They strike up a friendship.
As their friendship blossoms they decide to make a piece of art together, a poster. Frankie writes the line, ‘The edge is a shanty-town filled with gold seekers. We are the fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.’ Zeke puts his cleverly detailed ink illustration to the words. They decide to photocopy their artwork and secretly place some copies around the town. This grows from a few to 50 to many hundreds. This is how they will spend their summer holidays.
Little do they know that this decision will cause ever-growing ripples in their community. No-one in the town knows who is responsible for these posters, nor what those words mean. As people ruminate on the origins, things get out of hand. Even violent.
This is a coming-of-age story. A story of how the things we do when young can affect our whole lives and the lives of others. Especially the decisions we make as teenagers, when desires, and even obsessions overtake clear thinking.
The great strength of this book lies in Frankie and Zeke and their relationship.
I also enjoyed his book Nothing to See Here. Again, this is another book to read and reflect on.
Reviewed by Rowena Morcom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection.
His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012.
He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.
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