Work Like Any Other

March 7, 2016
In Reeves's thoughtful, absorbing debut set in 1920s Alabama, Roscoe leaves his dream job as an electrician with Alabama Power to move with his wife, Marie, and son to the farm where Marie grew up. Roscoe, unhappy and unaccustomed to farm work, decides to tap the state's power lines and bring electricity into the farm. He and the hired hand, Wilson, work for a year bringing Roscoe's dream to fruition, and the farm enjoys increased prosperity with its newly electric thresher. But disaster strikes when a man from the power company is electrocuted; Roscoe and Wilson are arrested. Roscoe is sentenced to 20 years for larceny and manslaughter. During his time in prison, he works in the dairy, the library, and finally with the dogs to track escaped prisoners. Roscoe struggles to come to terms with his life and worries about what happened to Wilson and Marie (who hasn't made contact with him since the arrest). Alternating between the third-person and Roscoe's first-person point of view and shifting the narrative back and forth in timeâfrom Roscoe's childhood, through his life with Marie, to the daily work of the prisonâReeves depicts the layers of loss that Roscoe must confront while inside. In this engrossing, vividly drawn debut, Reeves delivers a dazzlingly authentic portrait of a restless, remorseful mind. Agent: Peter Strauss, Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency.

October 15, 2015

Short-listed for the Tennessee Williams Fiction Contest and the Alexander Patterson Cappon Fiction Award, Reeves dreams up a first novel opening in 1920s rural Alabama, where Roscoe T Martin bitterly gives up his beloved work as an electrician when his wife inherits her father's failing farm. His continuing interest in electricity leads to tragedy.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2015
Work like Any Other is set in Alabama just as electricity is beginning to transform the countryside. Roscoe finds his passion and life's work in handling this invisible and dangerous force, and feels lost and angry when he has to give up his good electric company job and move to the failing farm his wife, Marie, a teacher, has inherited, a shabby place not yet hooked up to the electric lines running along the adjacent road. Certain that the only way they'll get ahead is with electricity, he taps illegally into the grid, recruiting Wilson, an African American who works and lives on the farm with his family, to help him. For a time, their lives are much improved. But such hubris tempts fate. We follow Roscoe to prison as Wilson disappears into a far more wretched form of incarceration and forced labor. First-time novelist Virginia Reeves fully inhabits Roscoe's mind and body as he navigates the miseries of convict life, where he is rewarded and resented for being literate (even officials can't read). His work with the dogs trained to hunt down escaped prisoners is harrowing; his happiest hours are spent working in the prison library. Reeves' sensitive portrayal of the librarian and illumination of how this sanctuary is run stand in humanizing contrast to the surrounding brutality.As Reeves dramatizes Roscoe's long, grim isolation, she circles back to tell Marie's and Wilson's stories, casting light on a little-known facet of the Jim Crow South. This is a consummately well-written, deeply affecting, thought-provoking American historical novel of hard labor, broken dreams, moral dilemmas, violence, racism, and the intricacies of marriage, parenthood, and friendship. Hope is found in reading, compassion, forgiveness, and good, honest work, whatever form it takes. Reeves' gripping, dynamically plotted, and profound novel will resonant on different frequencies for men and women and spark soul-searching and heated discussion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)