Fourth of July Creek

March 31, 2014
This uneven debut, set in 1980 Montana, isn’t always able to sustain the interest of its opening sections. The first chapter introduces us to social worker Pete Snow, who has been called by the police to defuse a domestic dispute between a 15-year-old boy, who has been in trouble with the law repeatedly, and his speed-addicted mother. The situation is grim, but Snow goes above and beyond the call of duty to place the teenager in a stable and supportive environment. His greater challenge comes with his next case: a boy who shows up on the playground of the local school dirty and reeking. The child, Benjamin Pearl, is reticent about revealing the circumstances at home, and Snow finds trying to help him difficult; Benjamin’s reclusive and angry father is opposed to assistance, even making the boy strip naked rather than wear the clean clothes Snow has provided. Snow’s efforts to help the Pearls despite the father’s hostility are the focus of the book, which is too long and features an unsatisfying ending.

January 1, 2014
Graced with powerful characters and beautifully focused writing, Henderson's epic debut hit my desk the day a critic friend buttonholed me at an awards event to tell me that it was something special. The 100,000-copy first printing suggests that plenty of other people have faith in this book. Set in Montana, the author's home state, in the late 1970s-early 1980s, it features social worker Pete Snow, increasingly dismayed with his job until he meets scrawny, untamed, 11-year-old Benjamin Pearl, whose crazy survivalist father is anticipating some kind of apocalypse. Pete is all fired up to help Benjamin, but then his own estranged daughter disappears and the FBI gets interested.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2014
Pete Snow is a social worker in early 1980s small-town Montana whose life is nearly as troubled as those of his clients. He is separated from his wife and teenage daughter, estranged from his father and stepmother, and easing his problems with alcohol. One morning Pete receives a call regarding a strange young boy who has shown up at a local school. Benjamin Pearl is the son of Jeremiah Pearl, a reclusive survivalist who lives in the hills outside town. Pete tries to help ragged and undernourished Benjamin but soon runs afoul of the paranoid Jeremiah. Through persistence, Pete slowly gains a degree of trust from Jeremiah and is able to provide some assistance. But when Jeremiah's activities draw the interest of the FBI, Pete is caught up in the web of suspicion. As the noose tightens, Jeremiah's dark secrets will profoundly affect Pete as well. VERDICT On a political level, Henderson skillfully presages the contemporary political environment in his portrayal of the America of three decades ago. On a deeper level, this dark, compassionate novel finds in Jeremiah's--and Pete's--pain a mirror of everyone's. This is a significant debut. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2014

Graced with powerful characters and beautifully focused writing, Henderson's epic debut hit my desk the day a critic friend buttonholed me at an awards event to tell me that it was something special. The 100,000-copy first printing suggests that plenty of other people have faith in this book. Set in Montana, the author's home state, in the late 1970s-early 1980s, it features social worker Pete Snow, increasingly dismayed with his job until he meets scrawny, untamed, 11-year-old Benjamin Pearl, whose crazy survivalist father is anticipating some kind of apocalypse. Pete is all fired up to help Benjamin, but then his own estranged daughter disappears and the FBI gets interested.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2014
Of wide open spaces and lives narrowly, desperately lived at the bitter ends of dirt and gravel roads.The spur of the Rockies at the northwestern corner of Montana is as hard and remote a stretch of country as any in the Lower 48, good reason why a person might want to disappear into it. Social worker Pete Snow, delivered to us in medias res, is well-used to what happens to people with too little money and too much booze or meth in tow. But he's not quite prepared for how years of being used to such things can wear a person down-and what will touch him off to the point that he's willing to smack a client. Says Pete to his target, trying to explain the rightness of his act, "[t]hose punches sure as shit come through me but they were not mine. As meant for you as they were, they were not mine." He's willing to cop to most responsibilities, but that doesn't stop his own life from dissolving. Meanwhile, he's caught up in a curious knot: In a land of snarling dogs and WIC checks, he has to sort out the life of a very nearly feral child, bound up in the even more complex life of a survivalist, paranoid and anti-statist, who may or may not be a Unabomber in the making. That brings the feds into the picture, and if Pete resorts to fisticuffs reluctantly, the FBI thinks nothing of beating their way around a countryside that looks ever more apocalyptic with each passing page. Henderson, a native Montanan, finds ample room for deep-turning plot twists in the superficially simple matter of a man looking for meaning in his own life while trying to help others too proud and mistrustful to receive that assistance. The story goes on a bit long, but the details are just right: It's expertly written and without a false note, if often quite bleak.Of a piece with Peter Heller's The Dog Stars and Cormac McCarthy's The Road in imagining a rural West that's seen better days-and perhaps better people, too.

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