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Back Roads
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Back Roads is the 2000 novel by the American writer Tawni O'Dell, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in March 2000.
ey Altmyer, a nineteen-year-old, has to care for his three sisters as his mother is in jail for killing his abusive father. Living in the coal town of Laurel Falls in backwoods Western Pennsylvania, he lusts after a mother of two who lives down the lane.
Plot summary
Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking beer and chasing girls.
Discussion
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Encyclopedia
Back Roads is the 2000 novel by the American writer Tawni O'Dell, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in March 2000.
Plot introduction
Harley Altmyer, a nineteen-year-old, has to care for his three sisters as his mother is in jail for killing his abusive father. Living in the coal town of Laurel Falls in backwoods Western Pennsylvania, he lusts after a mother of two who lives down the lane.
Plot summary
Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking beer and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three younger sisters after the shooting death of his physically abusive father and the arrest of his mother. His existence has become a joyless, exhausting blur of day care, mac and cheese dinners, working two minimum wage jobs, and monthly prison visits to a "once-devoted mother" who seems not only resigned but glad to have handed over the reins of parent and homemaker to her young son. As he sees it, his life is "lousy with women. All ages, shapes, sizes and levels of purity." Frustrated, overwhelmed, plagued by violent fantasies and trapped by feelings of love and duty, he's a guy in an impossible situation: an orphaned child with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager.
Life is further complicated when he develops an obsession with the sexy, melancholic mother of two down the road. Family secrets and unspoken truths threaten to consume him as his obsession deepens and she responds unearthing a series of staggering surprises. In the face of each unexpected revelation and through every wrenching ordeal, Harley does the best he can to hold it all together. Violent and disturbing yet touching and darkly funny, Harley's story is ultimately a search for his own self-worth as he slowly comes to realize that survival is a talent.
Characters in "Back Roads"
- Harley Altmyer – main character, son, brother, teenager
- Amber Altmyer – eldest of Harley's three younger sisters
- Jody Altmyer – youngest sister
- Misty Altmyer – middle sister
- Bud – his work colleague
- Church – his work colleague
- Rick – Harley's boss at Shop Rite
- Callie Mercer – neighbor, wife of the bank manager
- Brad Mercer – the bank manager, Callie's husband
- Esme Mercer – Callie's daughter, Jody's neighbor friend
- Zack Mercer – Callie and Brad's three year-old son
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