While their father takes his place at the center of a national scandal, these estranged siblings find themselves drawn from their four corners of the country, compelled along crowded interstates by resentment and confusion, converging on a 300-acre horse ranch outside Omaha for a final confrontation with the father they never had.
Charlesworth’s saga takes a sweeping sideways look at American ambition and even the great American novel. However, the tone is never cynical in this family tragedy. Rather, there is a beautiful sadness as well as mournful anger as Charlesworth evokes the loss following consequential choices.
Wrenching and often difficult-to-take ... or such an unabashedly polemical first novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill works surprising well, due in large measure to the unremitting intensity of its prose, the unsettling verisimilitude of its characters, and the moral courage at the core of its message.
May sound far-fetched, Charlesworth makes the psychological and emotional pain of these children very real ... A powerful debut novel for fans of literary fiction and with special import for fathers and soon-to-be fathers
