The removed

Title:

The removed

Author:

Hobson, Brandon, author.

Personal Author:

Hobson, Brandon, author.

ISBN:

9780062997548

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

272 pages ; 22 cm

Abstract:

"Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago-from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson"-- Provided by publisher.

Quah, Oklahoma. In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation. With the family's annual bonfire approaching-- marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray's death-- each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. -- adapted from jacket

Subject Term:

Cherokee Indians -- Fiction.

Sons -- Death -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Genre:

Summary:

"Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago-from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson"--

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Belmont	Book	FICTION HOBSON	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION HOBSON	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION HOBSON	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Westover Hills	Book	FICTION HOBSON	Searching... Unknown

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On Order

Summary

"A haunted work, full of voices old and new. It is about a family's reckoning with loss and injustice, and it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family's way home is full--in equal measure--of melancholy and love." --Tommy Orange, author of There There

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Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago--from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson

In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

With the family's annual bonfire approaching--an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray's death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory--Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest's mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite--or perhaps because of--his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.

Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma--a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.

"The Removed is a marvel. With a few sly gestures, a humble array of piercingly real characters and an apparently effortless swing into the dire dreamlife, Brandon Hobson delivers an act of regeneration and solace. You won't forget it." --Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Signs and wonders animate a Cherokee tale of family and community abiding through trauma. Stories are "like medicine, but without the bad taste," says Wyatt, a 12-year-old Cherokee boy in foster care who is preternaturally gifted in telling them. He spins mesmerizing, ambiguous fables about snakes and birds and an underworld, called the Darkening Land, for children at a shelter in rural Oklahoma. Wyatt, whose father is in jail and mother is in the wind, is spending a few days with Maria and Ernest Echota, the only Cherokee placement available. Fifteen years earlier, a White policeman shot and killed the couple's middle child, Ray-Ray, outside a mall. Now Wyatt's quirks and buoyant impersonations startle the Echotas by echoing those of Ray-Ray. More remarkably, the presence of this child appears to draw Ernest back from the fog of Alzheimer's. Maria, her surviving son, Edgar, and daughter, Sonja, all take turns narrating. So does Tsala, a mysterious figure who declares, "We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers….We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed." The talented Hobson conjures both the Trail of Tears and family fracturing, as he did in Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award. The traumas of forced removal and Ray-Ray's killing twine in Maria's depression, Edgar's meth use, and Sonja's drifting detachment. "I used to stare out the window, envying trees," she says. "This became a regular pattern of thought for me...that I stared at a tree outside and envied its anonymity, its beauty and silence....A tree could stand over a hundred years and remain authentic." Edgar, in his own Darkening Land, fights a treacherous fellow named Jackson Andrews, an evocation of Andrew Jackson. Each of the Echotas gropes toward their annual family bonfire commemorating Ray-Ray on the Cherokee National Holiday. Spare, strange, bird-haunted, and mediated by grief, the novel defies its own bleakness as its calls forth a delicate and monumental endurance. A slim yet wise novel boils profound questions down to its final word: "Home." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.