Karen's Reviews > The Lincoln Highway

This is a joyride. We have 3 kids in an old Studebaker who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year old – as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954 in pursuit of a better future.

Thank goodness it wasn’t happening in today’s world! This just wouldn’t be the same story.

This book is elegant and compulsively readable.

The author takes readers from Nebraska’s farmland to New York’s Adirondacks in just 10 days. We revisit American myths with a mix of warm-hearted humor and occasional outbursts of violence and malevolence.

The novel begins on June 12, 1954.

We meet Emmett who is being dropped off at his foreclosed farm to pick up his 8-year-old brother, Billy. The driver, is the warden of the Kansas reformatory where he had been living the past few months.

He was released early because of his father’s death.

The kindly warden reminds Emmett that he has paid his debt to society and he has his whole life ahead of him.

What the warden didn’t know, was that two fellow inmates had hitched a ride in his trunk and were now left at the farm along with Emmett and his brother – trouble-maker Duchess, and his hapless but sweet protégé, Woolly. (Interestingly enough, Woolly is the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility.)

One of the joys of reading this book, is wanting to know what led to these 3 being in the juvenile reformatory in the first place, and that also keeps us turning pages. We begin to understand how wrong turns can set one off course for years – though not necessarily for life.

This book is about storytelling and myth making. We are headed somewhere – with the chapters count down from Ten to One as they build to an incredible climax.

Billy has his heroes to follow down this Lincoln Highway west to San Francisco in hopes to find their mother who abandoned their family.

And so many interesting characters to appreciate along this journey.

“How easily we forget – we in the business of storytelling – that life was the point all along,”

It’s something this author continues to remind us readers why we continue to love reading him.