4459856
9780345394378
"A wise and acutely observant book...The narrative sparkles....An auspicious debut." --Dallas Morning News "A ROLLICKING TALE...SKILLFULLY CONSTRUCTED...Sure to amuse even the most urbane reader with its similarities to Mark Twain and Erskine Caldwell." --Kirkus Reviews High Plains, Texas. 1910. Maybe some small towns could emerge unscathed from a rancorous prohibition campaign and a searing drought, but this whiskey-soaked cowboy town certainly isn't one of them. Just when scrappy, street-fighting, twelve-year-old Tom Greer reckons that his hometown has gone completely crazy, he falls in with the newly arrived newspaper editor, Sam Adams, and starts to think twice--about everything. How can Tom sit in school when Adams's Plain Talk newspaper office is buzzing with lynchings, barroom brawls, the latest madness of Brother Nicholas's revival meetings, and the imminent appearance of Halley's Comet? All Tom's got to do is avoid the censure of his mother, the Widder Greer, who has fallen under the sway of Brother Nicholas and his wild-eyed prophecy about the end of the world.... "Two novels, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, and Allan Gurganus' The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, immediately come to mind for their ability to use history as a backdrop to good fiction. Steven Yount's WANDERING STAR is another such novel that shows again that historical fact can often serve as a starting point for some of our best fiction." --Waterbury RepublicanYount, Steven is the author of 'Wandering Star - Steve Yount - Mass Market Paperback' with ISBN 9780345394378 and ISBN 0345394372.
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