Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Dec 2010
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Katherine is 17, living alone in the beautiful, desolate landscape of southern Arizona. Her mother is feckless, her father busy with his new family. Meeting Son, the scion of a local rancher, seems like deliverance. They marry and live as a family in his parents' venerable adobe house, but it soon becomes clear that Son is a man who, as his father says, has a "young heart near withered beneath the breastbone."
Katherine must find her own way during a dangerous months-long drought, when everything seems to be disintegrating around her. Susan Froderberg's incantatory language--and her deep knowledge of both the complexities of a small, deeply-rooted place and the human heart--make Old Border Road soar.
"Starred Review. Told in a vernacular that mixes biblical grandiosity and down-home grit....A Southwest Gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore." - Kirkus
"Froderberg's novel is deliciously poetic, surprisingly timeless - though set in the present day - and undeniably western." - Booklist
"Seemingly important information is glossed over, and occasional shifts into nonlinearity are confusing. Too often the prose is indirect to the point of incoherence..." - Library Journal
"I read Susan Froderberg's fine and beguiling first novel a little bit, and a little bit more, and suddenly found myself in a beautiful and heartbreaking swirl of story and life and language and could not stop. The world therein is raw and urgent and yet adorned with element: burning and cooling, light and dark, droughty weather, delicate seeds greening, our perilous existence, our enduring sufferance." - Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star
"In Old Border Road, Susan Froderberg's remarkable feat of literary ventriloquism gives us two inventive and haunting voices to remember. One is that of Katherine, the young ranch bride striving for the language to fit her predicament; the other is the author's own, a fresh dialect of talent on the fiction scene." - Ivan Doig, National Book Award winning author of the novel, Work Song
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