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The summer Michael turns seventeen, his father disappears. One by one, other men also vanish from the blue-collar neighborhood outside Detroit where their fathers before them had lived, raised families, and—in a more promising era—worked. One props open the door to his shoe store and leaves a note: "I'm going to the moon," it reads. "I took the cash." The wives left behind drink, brawl, and sleep around, gradually settling down to make new lives. And Michael and his friends, stuck in the place where they have been abandoned, stumble through their twenties—until the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away . . .
With "echoes of Alice Hoffman's magic realism" (Booklist), this is a novel suffused with both humor and longing, by an author who has "considerable talent for capturing young-male ennui" (Entertainment Weekly).
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 1, 2018 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780547543581
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780547543581
- File size: 678 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- ATOS Level: 5.3
- Interest Level: 9-12(UG)
- Text Difficulty: 4
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Reviews
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November 15, 2004
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review
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PLEASE DON'T COME BACK FROM THE MOON
Dean Bakopoulos
. Harcourt
, $23 (288p) ISBN 0-15-101135-4
"When I was sixteen, my father went to the moon." Thus begins this debut novel about the mysterious disappearance of the men from a working-class suburb of Detroit. They go gradually, one by one, leaving for parts unknown—though more than one mentions the rocky orb up above. Michael Smolij's father is one of the last to vanish; once he's gone, Michael's musician mother plays "Norwegian Wood" on her violin, then takes two jobs to make ends meet. Michael, like all the boys in the neighborhood, has to grow up fast, working at the mall while taking community college courses. When Michael's mother remarries and moves away, leaving him the family house, Michael lands a job as a writer at a local radio station and starts dating a single mother with a five-year-old son, as if in an attempt to singlehandedly forge a new family for himself. The process of settling down, however, awakens a strange restlessness in him. Magic serves more as an emotional undercurrent than a mystery in this odd novel, part fable and part gritty realist chronicle. As Bakopoulos writes in an author's note, the book is a kind of elegy for his father's generation of downtrodden working-class men, but their disappointments are tempered by the modest hopes and ambitions of their sons in this gentle and moving tale. Agent, Amy Williams.
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