No one could claim Junebug Hurley has had an easy life. Following a fairly hardscrabble start in rural North Carolina, he goes to live with grandparents when his parents are killed running moonshine. His grandparents' closest neighbors are black sharecroppers; twins Fancy and Lightning quickly become Junebug's best - and only - friends. The situation is fraught, particularly as they come of age in the Jim Crow south where each child must determine how best to face - or flee - the bias and violence that infuses everyday life.
The Last Road Home, if I'm honest, is middling fiction. The story is fine, the characters are fine, there's nothing too much wrong, and yet. I've had a hard time putting my finger on the pulse of what left me less than completely satisfied. I think I've got it: in the end, I think Danny Johnson tries to do too much. The dichotomy between the urban cities withe their guns, drugs, and unrest and the mule-drawn tobacco farms left me with a case of whiplash.
Similarly, the last, and shortest, part of the book that covers Junebug's time in Vietnam felt too disconnected from the rest of the book. Perhaps that was Johnson's intent. Perhaps the disconnect was intended as a literary device to signal to readers the extent of the disconnect between soldier and civilian. If so, it's hard to criticize the intent. In the end, though, it left me feeling that I was reading two novellas, neither of which was as fully developed as it could have been.
Two-and-a-half stars.
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