Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
The road home from Iraq leads to America's Borderlands, harsh desert lands ruled over by smugglers and drug runners. Marines cannot help but serve, standing tall in dangerous lands to protect the people and the country they love.

Clayton and Luke walk the border roads together, trying to recapture a love that was almost destroyed by pride and anger. Chris finds love and salvation with a lost girl who needs a savior, and Gary comes home to find a world he does not understand, one changed beyond his recognition.

The bonds of love and brotherhood, forged on the battlefields of Iraq, will be sorely tested in the Borderlands.

BOOK REVIEW:
I absolutely loved this book, and I'm not sure anything I write in this review can fully capture how beautiful and moving I found this story to be. I'll give it a try anyways though.

This is a story of broken people, and how their lives intersect down in the Border lands. Clayton, Luke, Gary, and Chris are all returned from Iraq and each dealing with the reality of that in their own ways, in addition to other problems in their personal lives. Then you have Melody, the girl who is in many ways Chris's salvation, Mike, a journalist who is afraid of the world around him and himself, Juan, a mentally challenged kid who crosses the border from Mexico, Maggie and Clint, who take Juan in, and Henry, Clayton's recovering alcoholic friend from the reservation.

I fell in love with them all. Period. The relationships between them all were touching and powerful. I felt especially moved by the relationships between Juan and Maggie and Clint, and Clayton and Luke. I found myself actually tearing up three separate times while I read, I was so moved by the emotion Black conveyed between her characters.

Black is definitely brilliant at setting the scene, in my opinion. Her vivid descriptions brought to life a part of the country I've never seen, but could picture clearly in mind as a result of her colorful descriptions. The magic was in the small details. I really liked that Black used descriptions of the land as a way to perfect characterization. For example, this is from Mike's point of view:

The roadside was littered with empty beer bottles and the bodies of dead dogs.

Obviously overwhelmed and scared of the land and wilderness, Mike does not see the primitive beauty of the land like some of the other characters do. Then we have this from Juan's point of view:

They drove through beautiful country, mountains dark against the sky, and by sundown they pulled up in front of a small ranch house with a long front porch made from cedar logs.

Juan is still a kid and he views his travels as an adventure, so he sees the land as something exciting, as a simplistic backdrop for his adventure. This characterization through reactions to the land was very well done, in my opinion.

Normally I'm not a fan of stories that contain so little dialogue between the main characters, but in the case of "Border Roads" I think the sparse dialogue and the periods of long descriptions and observations actually serve to develop the story's theme of isolation in the first parts of the book. As the characters begin to heal, we see more dialogue and interaction between them and I thought this was a very effective technique.

I have very few complaints about this book and they are minor to be sure. Perhaps my biggest complaint is that it ended! I thought it was a beautiful, poignant story and I cannot recommend it enough!

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