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.
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.
Crewe debuts with a rollicking picaresque set in early 19th-century Appalachia...When Yip turns 14, gold is discovered nearby and Yip witnesses firsthand the violence that gold fever can bring. Forced to flee town after killing a man in self-defense, Yip is accompanied by the resourceful Dud Carter, who becomes his guardian angel...The two reluctantly help a man who escaped from slavery on a quest to find his sister, and Yip is abducted by the operator of a traveling show, who makes Yip play the part of a wild boy kept in a cage...Yip, who narrates as an adult, is an enthusiastic storyteller, and his relationship with Dud forms the fervent backbone of the episodic narrative...This memorable string of adventures reads like a one-of-a-kind mash-up of Charles Dickens and Cormac McCarthy
