Pilgrims Upon the Earth

April 30, 2007
Land’s 2004 memoir, Goat, which told of his abduction and beating at the hands of two hitchhikers as well as the fraternity hazing he suffered at Clemson University, portrayed a powerless postadolescent male at odds with a violent culture. A similar theme informs his glum first novel, a plodding study of teenage angst featuring 15-year-old Terry Webber, who lives in a South Carolina textile factory town with his shift foreman father (his mother committed suicide when Terry was a toddler). Terry smokes a lot (cigarettes, pot), fights with his dad and ritually cuts himself. He falls for Alice Washington, an odd girl who, apropos of nothing, says things like: “Could you be still with me? When everything else is so loud I fall down?” The two light out for Colorado where Alice’s sister lives on a commune, but Alice abruptly dies in a car wreck. The death and a move to yet another crap town sends Terry spiraling. Without much narrative direction, attention is drawn to the spare prose, which has a Prozac flatness.

October 1, 2007
Adult/High School-Terry Webber is a teen of the 1980s, but he is not your average 15-year-oldhis mother drowned herself when he was eight months old and he has been raised by a hard-hearted and vacant father. Constantly moving from small American town to town for Benjamin's job, Terry has little chance to make friends, but he is strangely taken with Alice Washington, in Issaqueena, SC. One day Terry and Alice decide to leave home and join Alice's sister at her commune north of Boulder, CO, but on the way disaster strikes and Alice is killed in a car accident. This episode sends Terry on a downward spiral to drugs, alcohol, and violence as he retreats into his tortured psyche. While Land addresses a fairly typical teen-angst subject, this is an odd book, due in part to Terry's character. He is so disillusioned at times that it is difficult to identify with him, but the oddness also comes from the writing style, which is fractured, matter-of-fact, and void of emotion. However, this style should appeal to older teens who despise generic high school novels and their teachers' obsession with grammar-teens who sit at their computers daily watching their lives as though they are mere players in a game."Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada"

Copyright 2007 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2007
Memoirist Land (Goat) makes his fiction debut with this coming-of-age chronicle of 15-year-old Terry Webber in Issaqueena, a South Carolina mill town where the chance for personal expression seems to be limited to suicide. Terry's classmate Basil Frick kills himself at the opening of the novel, and Terry's mother commits suicide when he is eight months old. This tragedy leaves Terry alone with his father, who works the second shift in an area textile plant. Terry finds refuge when he meets an older student named Alice Washington who inspires him with stories about the small community where her sister lives in Colorado, a place with "no such things as parents" where they grow vegetables and marijuana. Terry sets out with Alice for Colorado, but when she is killed on the interstate, he is forced to return home. Readers who can make it through the violence, drug abuse, and self-mutilation of the ensuing pages can witness Terry gain a measure of redemption. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries where the equally grim Goat circulated.Douglas Southard, CRA International Lib., Boston

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.