Furnace Creek Audiobook By Joseph Allen Boone cover art

Furnace Creek

A Novel

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Furnace Creek

By: Joseph Allen Boone
Narrated by: Graham Halstead
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Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades.

A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew—these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris—all before returning home to confront his life’s many expectations and disappointments.

Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek leaps the frame of Dickens’s masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.

©2022 Joseph Allen Boone (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing Coming of Age Genre Fiction
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I wanted to like this book more. I wish the author acknowledged that Newt kept a journal or some device that would’ve lent credibility to his sometimes perfect recall of details. Also it sounded overwritten at other times. That said I stayed with it until the end.


It began well and then petered out. When Newt and Marky are trying to solve a mystery I felt I was reading the Hardy Boys from my youth.

The last third was convoluted and not believable.

Also at times the author forgot he’s writing about a period 40-50 years ago and adds contemporary phrases, such as hoping a Caravaggio painting wouldn’t be snapped up by a billionaire. We weren’t thinking about billionaires in the 1980’s. Small but jarring. And lessened the authenticity.

Disappointing

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The critics got it right. This is a great read from start to finish. And Halstead is a delight to listen to.

A splendid read that is a JOY as an audio book.

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Loved it but the last several chapters before the final couple chapters dragged on a bit. Those seemed like a way too detailed epilogue. Even so, the story and narration were enjoyable.

Wonderful

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