I loved A Gentleman in Moscow, and while the summary of this book did not particularly appeal to me, I heard so many good things about it I couldn’t resist.
It’s just as good as A Gentleman in Moscow, and if you enjoyed that book, I highly recommend you read this one. It has great characters and it does a great job exploring each character and their relationships to each other in the context of one adventure gone horribly wrong. It’s also very well written.
The book is told in third-person limited perspective from various perspectives. We start with Emmett Watson, a teenaged boy being driven to his home in Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile detention center in Kansas where Emmett spent the last two years for having killed another teenaged boy. Emmett was released a few months early due to the fact that his father has just passed away and Emmett needed to take care of the estate and take care of his little brother, Billy.
Emmett’s father had been so terrible at farming, and gotten so deep into debt, that the bank has claimed the farm, the house, and everything of value in the house and on the farm. They try to take the car in the barn, but Emmett informs the banker it’s his car that he bought with his own money, which means it doesn’t belong to his father’s estate, and therefore cannot be claimed by the bank.
To avoid making his father’s mistakes, Emmett had taken up carpentry before being sent to Salina, the juvenile detention center. His reasoning was that everyone always needs a carpenter, and he had used the money he made apprenticing for the local carpenter to buy his car. His plan is to go to Texas because Texas is a big state with a fast-growing population, so there’s bound to be demand for carpenters.
But Billy has other ideas. After Emmett was sent to Salina and their father died, Billy found a stack of postcards sent to them from their mother in the first few days after she abandoned them several years earlier when Billy was just a baby. She left on July 5th and the postcards she sent them were dated July 5th, July 6th, July 7th, etc. Each was from a different place west of Nebraska, and the last one was from San Francisco.
Emmett has no desire to track down the mother who abandoned them all those years ago, and he tries to explain to Billy that their chances of finding her in a city as big as San Francisco are slim to none, but Billy knows how much their mother loved fireworks. All they have to do is get there by July 4th and make it to the biggest firework show of them all in Chinatown in San Francisco and they’ll be reunited with their mother.
Ever practical, Emmett goes to the library to do some research and finds that California is growing even faster than Texas, so he agrees to take Billy to San Francisco.
Moreover, Billy has found out about something called the Lincoln Highway, which runs straight through the country from Times Square in New York all the way to San Francisco, and he is determined to take the Lincoln Highway all the way to San Francisco, not least because he mapped out their mother’s apparent trajectory and she seems to have also taken the Lincoln Highway, but before they even have a chance to leave, things go awry.
Turns out two of Emmett’s friends from Salina, Duchess and Woolly, snuck into the warden’s trunk to hitch a ride to Emmett’s house and somehow managed to sneak out of the car while the warden was dropping off Emmett. Considering the warden didn’t even make it inside the house, I find it hard to believe two teenaged boys were able to climb out of his trunk and hide themselves somewhere on the farm without being noticed, but I suppose I just have to suspend my disbelief for that bit.
Duchess is the uneducated son of an alcoholic actor who did a lot of vaudeville and Shakespeare when he could get a gig at all. He was the master of running up large bills and ducking out just before the check arrived, and Duchess seems to have inherited that ability in a different form. He always pays his debts, but he’s determined to live life to the fullest, and he often manages to escape the worst, if not all, of the liability. Unfortunately, someone else always seems to get stuck with the bill, which means being friends with Duchess is difficult at best and dangerous at worst. As one of the characters pointed out, Duchess tends to get tunnel vision. He sees what he wants and goes after it without any regard for the damage he’s causing in his periphery.
At the moment, the price Duchess has his sights set on is Woolly’s trust fund.
Woolly was raised by a very wealthy WASP family in New York and bounced around from one private school to another until he was finally committed to Salina for stealing a fire truck.
The thing about Woolly is that he is the nicest person, but he’s not the brightest. He “stole” the fire truck because he thought it had been misplaced (as if anyone could misplace a fire truck), so he returned it to the fire station, leaving the firemen in the store the truck had been parked in front of. While Woolly was driving the truck, a call came in about a fire on a horse farm, but because the firemen couldn’t reach their truck, they were unable to arrive in time to put out the fire before some horses died. Thankfully no people were hurt.
Things like that tend to get Woolly in trouble, but only one of his two sisters seems to understand that everything Woolly does he does with the best of intentions. Everyone else, namely “Dennis”, Woolly’s brother-in-law, seems to think Woolly intends to inflict harm with everything he does.
Since Woolly was committed to Salina, “Dennis” had Woolly declared temperamentally unfit to manage his trust fund of $150,000. Fortunately, Woolly’s great-grandfather just happens to keep $150,000 in cash in a safe in his summer house in the Adirondacks, so Duchess has decided he, Woolly, and Emmett should all go over there and collect the $150,000 and split it between the three of them.
Emmett has no intention of participating in this scheme, but when Duchess steals his car (and the $3,000 his father had left him in the trunk of the car), Emmett doesn’t have a choice but to head to New York and track them down to get his car back.
What ensues is a series of mishaps, perilous situations, new friends, old friends, etc. And, of course, we get to find out exactly what Emmett, Duchess, Woolly, and Townhouse did to end up in Salina.
I’m not sure how I feel about the ending, but I don’t want to spoil it, so you’ll have to read it for yourself and let me know what you think.