... does a wonderful job of capturing this kind of melancholy ... Ronan has a gift for propulsive sentences that make even his deeply interior moments somehow suspenseful and endearing ... the main propulsive engine of the novel becomes a question that often applies to relationships as much as it applies to stories about America’s forgotten and marginalized landscapes: Can we save them with love, or will they simply collapse?
As Flint native Ronan’s rich and unflinching saga sways through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, it reveals a decaying city once at the heart of America’s industrial and cultural identity. The intimate histories in this stunning and masterful debut reveal universal truths of renewal and redemption at individual and societal levels.
... a tender and hardscrabble story of love and pain ... Ronan’s characters brim with resilience, and their survival reflects the highs and lows of the site referenced in the title, a Chevrolet factory left to ruin and later reclaimed as a park. Ronan ably humanizes a city known for the pity it’s elicited for many decades.
Individual chapters make for some fine set pieces, like a tryst undone by a tornado, Monae’s uncles witnessing the Detroit riots, and a 1967 incident in which Who drummer Keith Moon drives a car into a Flint hotel swimming pool. Ronan takes on a lot of themes, symbols, and history, which makes the overall time-hopping narrative feel clunky at times. But she has ambition to spare and an engaging melancholic style, especially when she’s in August’s head ... A smart Rust Belt love story informed by its location's complex history.
