I recently penned a review for the Acton Institute of a new novel, which struck me as exemplary for Christian conservatives, & which led me to befriend its author. You might enjoy the novel & wish well to the author.
When Bill Rivers put a copy of his debut novel, Last Summer Boys, in my hand earlier this summer, he didn’t tell me it came with blurbs from former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, for whom he had been a speechwriter, & Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia. We met in order to do something of an interview: I wanted to get to know a young writer who seemed unusually bashful in an era of self-promotion; indeed, Bill was more inclined to hide his résumé than brag. (For example, he neglected to boast that he already has more than 20,000 pleased readers.) I went away from our meeting convinced that his concern with the honor of dutiful service & the need for faith was genuine, so those blurbs are remarkably apposite—honest advertising, of which we have very little.
The novel works its way to these themes. Last Summer Boys starts in a troubled America in the summer of ‘68, a country that has lost its civil peace & also its innocence, which is quite a burden to place on a boys’ adventure tale set in rural Pennsylvania. Further, the four protagonists are all-American & thus woefully unfit to face up to this drama: The Elliott boys are 13-year-old Jack; 16-year-old Will, an admirer of Robert F. Kennedy & Bob Dylan; & Pete, who’s turning 18 on the Fourth of July & is as confident, good-natured, & beautiful as you can imagine. The fourth is their city cousin Frankie, who’s the same age as Jack, the narrator, but smarter & already a writer, no doubt advantages of the city.
The Elliott parents, Gene & Addie, are similarly idealized. There’s a warm but strong & sometimes harsh father, a Korean War veteran & always helpful to his fellow man, & a beautiful, very religious mother, whose no-nonsense way of speaking gives her a handle on her somewhat wild boys. They’re a churchgoing family, but they live away from the town. They’re proud but poor; Gene works as caretaker of the estate of a local, eccentric man of wealth. They are masters of an old house, said to be two centuries old, which would make it pre-Revolutionary, a symbol of the continuity of pioneer life in America, whose virtues they embody. They’re also a military family, with the quiet pride of the honorable & the belief that they must answer the nation’s call.
Read the whole thing here. You can also see the novel reviewed at Law & Liberty & at The American Conservative. You can also listen to an interview with Bill at The Federalist.
You can buy the book in whatever way you prefer, including audiobook, at Barnes & Noble.