{"id":913,"date":"2018-12-31T14:38:03","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=913"},"modified":"2018-12-31T14:38:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:38:03","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=913","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
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Gordon Atkinson,<\/span> BA, MA, Mdiv, was the author of the blog RealLivePreacher (now offline) and Tertium Squid (www.TertiumSquid.com), where he writes about current events and comments on important things like biking, whiskey, heavenly bodies, stars, depression, tea, theology and interesting people he meets. He is the author of the books RealLivePreacher <\/span>(Wm. B. Eerdmann; winner of the Independent Publisher award for best creative non-fiction), Turtles All the Way Down,<\/span> and A Christmas Story You’ve Never Heard<\/span>. He was a contributor to Christian Century <\/span>magazine and founding editor for The High Calling website, which brought together and featured the work of hundreds of independent writers. His writing was chosen to be included in The Best Christian Writing, <\/span>2004. This is Gordon’s first novel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>LITERARY FICTION<\/p>\n

Gordon Atkinson<\/span><\/p>\n

Foy: On the Road to Lost<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Material Media<\/p>\n

Paperback, 978-0-9967-5355-5, (also available as an e-book), 194 pgs., $15.95<\/p>\n

March 1, 2017<\/p>\n

Minister Foy Davis is having a bad week.<\/span> His wife, and mother of his daughters, has served him with divorce papers, then two days later, in a more or less mutual decision (\u201clike two lovers staring at each other and saying, almost simultaneously, We need to talk\u201d), he\u2019s been removed and\/or resigned as pastor of a Baptist church in San Antonio. Foy\u2019s midlife crisis of faith has been building throughout his adult life. He wonders what it would be like to be \u201ca regular person.\u201d As he\u2019s leaving the church for the last time, he reaches for a vial of rose oil used for anointing the sick, gifted to him by an Episcopal-priest friend, and anoints his own forehead.<\/p>\n

Foy sets out to discover what he suspects he might\u2019ve been missing. In New Orleans. During Mardi Gras. He may even take up cigars. Emotionally volatile\u2014swinging from anger to sorrow and back again\u2014Foy is weary of being responsible for his congregation (for their souls, no less), and thinks he\u2019d like to be \u201cmildly empathetic, across a vast emotional chasm,\u201d instead. He has \u201cfantasized about \u2026 absolute freedom\u201d for years, but in the event, he may find that it really is just another word for nothing left to lose. No matter how he tries, ecumenical Foy can\u2019t make himself stop caring about people.<\/p>\n

Foy: On the Road to Lost,<\/span><\/a><\/span> the first novel by Gordon Atkinson, M.Div.,<\/span> doesn\u2019t fit neatly into any of our convenient genres. It is only loosely a novel, as addressed in the Author\u2019s Note. Each chapter is a self-contained unit, and the whole resembles a collection of linked short stories. These related tales are really a character sketch, but too finely developed and richly detailed to be termed a \u201csketch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Atkinson is at his best writing about Foy\u2019s childhood, as a small child in Fort Davis, then as an adolescent in Houston. I\u2019m reminded of the story of Harper Lee\u2019s<\/span> agent telling her to rework her book from Scout\u2019s point of view\u2014that\u2019s how good Atkinson is with the boy Foy. Another standout character is Foy\u2019s mother, a philosophy student who put away her ambitions to settle down to marriage, motherhood, and the expectations placed on a preacher\u2019s wife in the 1960s. \u201cThe Sunday school teachers swaddled [Foy\u2019s] mind every Sunday morning,\u201d Atkinson writes. \u201dSunday nights she [Foy\u2019s mother] took him outside under the stars \u2026 [and] carefully unwound the swaddling clothes and set him free.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kudos belong to the design team responsible for This slim, bright yellow book sports beautiful end pages of black-and-white photographic images of the mountains of West Texas and charmingly whimsical pencil sketches of a character we assume to be Foy. Even the typeface has a story; it involves a dispute between the owners of a nineteenth-century British press resulting in every piece of the metal typeface being dumped into the Thames. There are so many small, literary jewels in Foy: On the Road to Lost.<\/span><\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}