A revisionist take on the Western novel set in the early nineteenth-century Georgia gold rush features a fifteen-year-old mute boy and his friend on the run after commiting a major crime.
Paddy Crewe’s ambitious, cinematic debut novel set during Georgia’s gold rush in a semi-mythic American south that recalls both Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Faulkner’s Light in August...Purporting to be the written account of Yip’s adventures narrated from the comfort of later life, it explores a society in flux, one about to turn its back on religion and embrace greed and individualism...It’s also a rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist...My Name Is Yip is a remarkably vivid and energetic debut novel; a consummate linguistic performance made all the more extraordinary by the fact that its author is from Stockton-on-Tees rather than Atlanta, Georgia.
This is violent, anarchic American history with echoes of Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, but Paddy Crewe’s take is startlingly original. Yip’s narrative voice is extraordinary and vivid; it conjures up the stately, ornate language of the early 19th-century writers without being glacial or clotted ... Self-consciously mannered first-person narratives can overwhelm and irritate, but Crewe, a young British writer, has hit gold here. Yip’s tale is immersive and beautiful in unexpected places ... On the strength of this sensational debut, you will be hearing a lot more about Paddy Crewe.
The novel is billed as a western, in the sense that Georgia was on the frontier in the early part of the nineteenth century...But this can more accurately be described as essentially a British literary take on an American-style folk tale, presented from Yip’s perspective in a near stream-of-consciousness; his narration is an eccentric hodgepodge of faux backwoods grammar and Dickensian eloquence...Adventure, characterization, and illumination of the human condition are the standouts here, pathos misting over the tale like water on the gold-flecked stones of the town’s creek...This is Crewe’s debut, and with this distinctive offering, he’s proved himself to be an author to watch.
