Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2008
368 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Luttie McFee's history has taught her to avoid attachments...to people, to places, and to almost everything. With her mother long dead and her father long gone to find his fortune in Las Vegas, 15-year-old Luttie lives in the god-forsaken town of Yankton, South Dakota with her nine-year-old brother, Fate, and Floy Satterfield, the 300-pound ex-girlfriend of her father. While Lutie shoplifts for kicks, Fate spends most of his time reading, watching weird TV shows and worrying about global warming and the endangerment of pandas. As if their life is not dismal enough, one day, while shopping in their local Wal-Mart, Floy keels over and the two motherless kids are suddenly faced with the choice of becoming wards of the state or hightailing it out of town in Floy's old Pontiac. Choosing the latter, they head off to Las Vegas in search of a father who has no known address, no phone number and, clearly, no interest in the kids he left behind.
Made In The USA is the alternately heartbreaking and life-affirming story of two gutsy children who must discover how cruel, unfair and frightening the world is before they come to a place they can finally call home.
"Starred Review. Letts manages this potentially maudlin or lurid material with a frank lyricism, delivering a heartbreaking tale about love, loss and survival that will stick with the reader long after the last page is turned." - Publishers Weekly.
"So much travail, so much uplift! So much phony plotting and superficial characterization." - Kirkus Reviews.
This information about Made in the USA was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Billie Letts was born Billie Gipson in Tulsa Oklahoma.
She was married to professor-turned-actor Dennis Letts until his death in 2008, and is the mother of Dana Letts, playwright and actor Tracy Letts (who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) and jazz
musician and composer Shawn Letts.
Dennis, who served as Billie Lett's editor for her novels, died of cancer in February 2008. Billie died in August 2014 aged 76.
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