"Tom's Crossing is so big that when I got it out on the tube, I felt like that character on Trigger Happy TV with his enormous mobile phone. Look, I seemed to be telling the passengers scrolling Instagram on their devices, I'm reading a book! The novel is not merely long, it's also a challenging, deliberately arcane work that insists on its own epic status, yet has at its heart a straightforward and compelling story."
"Through a shared love of horses, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with handsome and popular Tom Gatestone. When Tom dies of cancer, he extracts a promise from Kalin to save the two horses they love from the knacker's yard. The bulk of the novel tells the story of Kalin's quest to take these horses, Mouse and Navidad, to safety in the wilderness beyond the Isatch mountain range."
"Along the way, Kalin is joined unexpectedly by Tom's plucky adopted little sister Landry and, even more unexpectedly, by Tom's ghost. A violent series of events raises the stakes: the evil Orvop patriarch, Orwin Porch, owner of Porch Meats, and mortal enemy of the Gatestones, sets off to foil Kalin's already difficult mission. There are so many choric figures that I wondered if they belonged to Danielewski superfans who had crowdfunded the novel"
Tom's Crossing is a 1,200-plus-page epic that combines arcane formal ambition with a clear emotional core. Sixteen-year-old Kalin March, a nerdy outsider and gifted horse rider in Orvop, Utah, befriends popular Tom Gatestone and vows, after Tom dies of cancer, to save Mouse and Navidad from the knacker's yard. Kalin's five-day, pre-Halloween trek beyond the Isatch mountains becomes a dangerous quest populated by Tom's ghost, Tom's adopted sister Landry, and numerous choruses of characters. Orwin Porch, patriarch and owner of Porch Meats, emerges as a violent antagonist determined to stop the rescue.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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