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Summary
Summary
Dodgers is a dark, unforgettable coming-of-age journey that recalls the very best of Richard Price, Denis Johnson, and J.D. Salinger.
It is the story of a young LA gang member named East, who is sent by his uncle along with some other teenage boys--including East's hothead younger brother--to kill a key witness hiding out in Wisconsin. The journey takes East out of a city he's never left and into an America that is entirely alien to him, ultimately forcing him to grapple with his place in the world and decide what kind of man he wants to become.
Written in stark and unforgettable prose and featuring an array of surprising and memorable characters rendered with empathy and wit, Dodgers heralds the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.
WINNER OF THE LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE 2017 FOR BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER
WINNER OF THE CWA GOLDSBORO GOLD DAGGER 2016 FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR
WINNER OF THE CWA JOHN CREASEY NEW BLOOD DAGGER 2016 FOR BEST DEBUT CRIME NOVEL
WINNER OF THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD 2017 FOR DEBUT FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL 2017 FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
NOMINATED FOR THE EDGAR AWARD 2017 FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL
Author Notes
Bill Beverly is an American teacher and writer, born in 1965. He grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and attended Oberlin College and the University of Florida. He is the author of On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America, and Dodgers, which won the 2016 Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the New Blood Dagger for best debut crime novel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Beverly's fiction debut is an atmospheric thriller, a crime novel of violence and murder, and an on-the-road experience. The book's young antihero is a 15-year-old named East, who is standing at a crossroads to his future. His upward mobility through the ranks of his South Central L.A. gang, due primarily to his high-ranking uncle Fin, was halted when he allowed his feelings for a young murdered girl to interfere with his guardianship of a drug house. To reestablish his nephew's credibility, Fin sends him with three other teen gangsters on a road trip from L.A. to kill a judge on vacation in Wisconsin. Actor Jackson tells Beverly's granite-hard story in a smooth, almost gentle voice that underscores the pressures East is feeling on the trip. Something in that just-telling-it-like-it-is attitude highlights the boy's sense of confusion and frustration, saddled with a job he doesn't think he can do, traveling in unfamiliar surroundings, with boys he can't control. Jackson has no trouble clarifying the members of East's teammates on the hit. But his finest achievement is his presentation of East, a too-rapidly maturing boy, confused by his conflicting emotions, uncertain of what to do, how to do it, and where to go to seek advice. A Crown hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this stunning crime-fiction debut, East, a 15-year-old gang member in L.A., loses his job after police raid the drug house where he's standing guard. Offered a chance at redemption, he joins a crew driving cross-country to Wisconsin to kill a witness in a case against his boss. With him are Michael Wilson, a 20-year-old smooth talker; Walter, an overweight 17-year-old problem-solver; and East's own brother, Ty, an unknowable 13-year-old killer. East has never been out of L.A. and the journey is transformative, forcing him to confront problems inside and outside the van while figuring out who he is and why he was ultimately sent along. The premise and execution are terrific, and the prose is remarkable: Beverly does more with a sentence than many writers accomplish in a paragraph. East and his compatriots are old before their time, and yet we never lose the sense that they are still growing up, even if their growing-up is like that of soldiers dropped behind enemy lines in their first war. They are black, and the highway they travel is very white indeed. Highly recommended for fans of Richard Price, this is a searing novel about crime, race, and coming-of-age, with characters who live, breathe, and bleed.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BILL BEVERLY'S DEBUT NOVEL is a caper of sorts. The crew consists of East, the "good son" of a troubled single mom; his violent half brother, Ty; Walter, oversize and intellectually gifted; and Michael Wilson, a glib college boy. Fin, a drug lord, sends this African-American foursome from Los Angeles to Wisconsin, where they're instructed to kill a witness before he can testify against the operation. The twist? The would-be assassins range in age from 13 to 20 and are so unfamiliar with the American landscape that one of them marvels, somewhat skeptically, that a black man actually lives in Wisconsin. One might wonder why a seasoned criminal would send boys to do a man's job, but Fin has blood ties to East and high hopes for his future. East's apprenticeship has involved mostly "standing yard," managing a youthful team of lookouts, runners and enforcers on the perimeter of a drug house. It's relatively simple work, but in a place where little girls get caught in the crossfire and kids have nicknames like Cancer, the prospect of death is ever-present. A lazy reader might compare Beverly's novel to similar fables by Richard Price, but a genuine conversation about such stories necessarily includes inexcusably neglected urban chroniclers like Ronald Fair ("We Can't Breathe"), Jess Mowry ("Way Past Cool") and Jervey Tervalon ("Understand This"). It spoils nothing to mention that the mission goes sideways, that East takes some lumps and ultimately finds himself alone in the Midwest, friendless and freezing. Although Beverly evokes the great outdoors with photographic clarity, claustrophobia effectively haunts his narrative. The housing project East patrolled is known as the Boxes. His makeshift sleeping quarters are partly devised from discarded cardboard containers. It would be an easy metaphor - perhaps too easy - if Beverly didn't pull back and enable East to discover that the nation is full of boxes. Not the "little boxes on the hillside" of folk-music fame but the crippling confines imposed by limited options and crumbling infrastructure. East had envisioned Iowa as a land composed solely of corn, tractors and cows. Instead he sees "houses thrown up like milk cartons in lonely space - dingy, flat, unpainted cinder-block foundations. Strips of siding hanging off the corners like bandages. In front of each waited a little collection of beat-up vehicles like a boy would arrange in a sandbox." While East is undeniably its central character, "Dodgers" is very much an ensemble production. (The title refers to the baseball jerseys the boys are given to wear on their mission.) Lost in America, East and his crew cross paths with a motley sample of their struggling countrymen, including rural gun brokers, strung-out dopers and lonely doughnut-shop regulars. With his focus on people and personalities, the author could justifiably bypass the bigger picture, the heartland rusting to death in the background. But, admirably, he doesn't. At the paintball range where East finds temporary work, Perry, the vividly drawn proprietor, offers a telling summation of his customers: "These days, most of these boys who come in here every day, secretly, the thing they want is for that girl to turn them out. She can keep the house. The sooner she gets another man, the sooner he is free. He can't fix nothing anyway. Gets an apartment that's tiny - the size of that bathroom. That's all he wants.... Works a little when he can. Got his beer and his PlayStation. Can't look his dad in the eye. That's what I mean. We were up there, and we've come down to this." The ambient despair is daunting territory for East, an earnest young hood who cleans up after himself. Still, he dares to hope, even on the run. Flight, he reflects, is "one part fear, one part the blindest excitement you'd ever known. It freed you from time, from who you were or the matter of what you'd done." And yet, for all his running, he can't elude an inevitable truth: You can be in the middle of nowhere and still have no place to hide. JABARI ASIM'S books include "Only the Strong," a novel.
School Library Journal Review
Fifteen-year-old East is pulled from his job as gang lookout at a drug site to join three other young black men on a road trip from California to Wisconsin, where they will carry out an assassination. Rich characterization and profound cultural insights make this debut novel an unforgettable journey for teen readers. (http://ow.ly/PN4C305MyAa)-Diane Colson, Gainesville City College, FL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
In contrast, The Turning Tide (Orion, [pound]12.99) by [Brooke Magnanti], author of the bestselling Belle du Jour books, is a helter-skelter of a book with so many different plot strands and points of view that one wonders how on earth all the dots are going to join up to form a coherent whole. After her drug-dealer boyfriend is sent to prison for murder and she is kicked out of university, Erykah Macdonald settles for a quiet life in the London suburb of Molesey. Twenty years on, it is beginning to pall. Husband Rab has lost his job but pretends otherwise, and Erykah is having an affair with a woman at her rowing club and about to leave him when he announces that he has won [pound]20m on the lottery. The Macdonalds become front-page news and Erykah's past is exposed, but not before the lottery win gets complicated ... However, there is also the matter of a body found on a beach in the Hebrides and a Scottish version of Ukip with a Falklands veteran as its figurehead, as well as organised crime, fracking and the exposure of political shenanigans on Twitter -- a rich mix that doesn't, ultimately, succeed in adding up to the sum of its parts. That said, Magnanti is a good storyteller and her writing is confident, shrewd and often enjoyably satirical. Dodgers by Bill Beverly; Sunset City by Melissa Ginsburg; The Turning Tide by Brooke Magnanti; The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis; The House of Fame by Oliver Harris Told in precise, economical prose, Bill Beverly's debut novel Dodgers (No Exit, [pound]14.99) is the story of 15-year-old East, a foot soldier in LA's street-level army of drug peddlers, who is tasked with killing a witness before a case comes to trial. Together with his feral, trigger-happy 13-year-old half-brother Ty, and two other young men, East, who has never been outside his home city before, travels across Wisconsin to commit the murder, but -- as might be expected -- things do not go entirely to plan. The book is a mashup of rite of passage and road trip, with the four main characters at odds not only with each other, but also with a country that is entirely alien to them. The quiet, watchful East, at once world-weary and naive, is a heartbreakingly believable character, and, although it could be argued that the drama peaks too early, giving a sense of anticlimax, Dodgers is well worth the read. Sunset City, the first novel by American poet Melissa Ginsburg (Faber, [pound]12.99), is set in Houston, Texas, where 22-year-old barista Charlotte reconnects with Danielle, her best friend from high school, just days before a detective turns up on her doorstep to inform her that her erstwhile buddy has been found murdered in a motel room. Danielle was a troubled rich kid (abuse, estrangement from family, addiction, prison) who, at the time of her death, worked for a pornographic website, and Charlotte's attempts to piece together what happened lead her into a sleazy and dangerous underworld. Sunset City is sexy, boozy, poignant and funny, with the excellence of Ginsburg's writing more than compensating for some fairly thin plotting. Not a roller coaster, but none the worse for that -- it is pathos, rather than twists and turns, that will keep you glued to the pages. In contrast, The Turning Tide (Orion, [pound]12.99) by Brooke Magnanti, author of the bestselling Belle du Jour books, is a helter-skelter of a book with so many different plot strands and points of view that one wonders how on earth all the dots are going to join up to form a coherent whole. After her drug-dealer boyfriend is sent to prison for murder and she is kicked out of university, Erykah Macdonald settles for a quiet life in the London suburb of Molesey. Twenty years on, it is beginning to pall. Husband Rab has lost his job but pretends otherwise, and Erykah is having an affair with a woman at her rowing club and about to leave him when he announces that he has won [pound]20m on the lottery. The Macdonalds become front-page news and Erykah's past is exposed, but not before the lottery win gets complicated ... However, there is also the matter of a body found on a beach in the Hebrides and a Scottish version of Ukip with a Falklands veteran as its figurehead, as well as organised crime, fracking and the exposure of political shenanigans on Twitter -- a rich mix that doesn't, ultimately, succeed in adding up to the sum of its parts. That said, Magnanti is a good storyteller and her writing is confident, shrewd and often enjoyably satirical. The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis (Mantle, [pound]12.99), an ambitious if unwieldy and sometimes overwritten debut, begins in 2010, when an elderly woman known only as "Mrs Walker" dies alone in a freezing Edinburgh flat. Shortly afterwards, middle-aged Margaret, washed-up, dishonest and broke, returns from London to an equally chilly welcome from her mother. Desperate for a job, she winds up trying to discover the dead woman's identity. Timeslip parallel narratives covering much of the 20th century detail insanity, poverty, exploitation, child murder and a series of women who are desperate to escape the confines of their lives and sever their ties with the past. It is pretty clear from the off that Margaret is, unwittingly, tracing her own family history -- and the setup means that the reader ends up knowing far more than she ever will -- but, despite some longueurs, this unsentimental, labyrinthine tale is both intriguing and atmospheric. Anyone who fancies a sharp, exciting and all-round tasty London thriller would be well advised to pick up The House of Fame (Jonathan Cape, [pound]12.99) by Oliver Harris, the third novel to feature rule-breaking anti-hero Nick Belsey. The maverick cop is -- unsurprisingly -- suspended, pending a hearing for gross misconduct, and camping out in the now-abandoned Hampstead police station when a woman looking for her missing son leads him to pop star and celebrity fiancee Amber Knight, and he finds himself embroiled in a toxic melee of hedonists, hangers-on, publicity agents and a mysterious, not to say sinister, organisation called the Bridge Foundation. A fast-paced thriller that is also nuanced and evocative is a hard trick to master -- hats off to Harris, who has, once again, managed it with style and authority. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
Four street kids from Los Angeles discover that America is weirder, and bigger, than they imagined. It's tempting to call Beverly's debut a coming-of-age novel; its protagonist, a boy known only as East, is 16. Yet East has come of age long before the action starts: a lookout at a Los Angeles drug house, he is experienced beyond his years. "He was no fun," Beverly writes, "and they respected him, for though he was young, he had none in him of what they hated most in themselves: their childishness. He had never been a child." That's one of the charms and also one of the issues with the novel, which opens with a police shootout at the house East has been paid to protect. In the aftermath, he's sent, with three other young men (one of them his brother), on a looping road trip to Wisconsin, where a troublesome witness must be killed. The title refers to the LA Dodgers gear the four put on as camouflage, a strategy to fit in, or at least pass beneath the radar of, an America they do not understand. Beverly is best tracing this elusive strangeness, the way common landscapestruck stops, gas stations, interstatescan be alien, even dangerous: "Here the ground was nearly empty of buildings and the mountains were like people, huddled figures, blue and gray and white, so high." Still, as the novel progresses, it begins to lose its path. Partly, it's that the drama peaks too early, but even more, that East comes to us so fully formed there's no room for him to grow. Yes, he faces challenges and makes decisions. Yes, he adapts to circumstance. Ultimately, however, he does not develop throughout the book so much as remain consistentthe reason, of course, is that he's so highly valued as a lookout, yet it's problematic when it comes to his arc as a character. An interesting debut that doesn't quite live up to its promise. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With characterizations recalling the best of George Pelecanos, this debut novel by Beverly (American literature, Trinity Univ.; On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America) follows the coming-of-age story of East, a young Los Angeles gang lookout who is sent on a road trip with three others to kill a witness in Wisconsin. This is not the usual road trip narrative; each of the four young men could easily carry their own book, but East, a smart and sympathetic narrator, propels the story with his internal assessments of his cohorts and their situation. An unexpected turn in the latter third of the novel brings the focus more squarely on East, who has never been out of L.A. and begins to examine the possibilities that are available to him beyond his urban life as well as the reality of being a young black man in a predominantly white Midwest America. VERDICT Fans of HBO's The Wire and Richard Price novels will be engaged by the book's themes of race, identity, and the U.S. class system.-Julie Elliott, Indiana Univ. Lib., South Bend © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.