Presidio

June 4, 2018
In this stellar debut, it’s 1972, and Troy Falconer, a professional car thief, returns home to New Cona, Tex. Troy comes at the request of his younger brother, Harlan, whose wife, Bettie, has left him and taken all their money. The two brothers steal a car and hit the road in search of Bettie, unaware of the sleeping passenger in the backseat, Martha Zacharias, an 11-year-old runaway from a Mennonite community. She’s looking to be reunited with her father, Aron, who is doing time in a Juárez prison. Not wanting to be arrested for kidnapping, Troy and Harlan plan to drop Martha off at the nearest bus station, but they haven’t counted on Martha calling Aron to tell him their location, or Aron catching up with them as they are dropping Martha off. Interspersed with this odyssey through the Texas Panhandle are entries from Troy’s diary that detail his gradual descent into a life of crime, which, unfortunately, take time away from the contemporary story. Like the young heroines of She Rides Shotgun, Martha is a memorably single-minded heroine who can stand up to adults engaged in unlawful pursuits. Kennedy soberly etches a Texas landscape of violence and despair as vividly as anything by Larry McMurtry.

June 15, 2018

Troy Falconer is a professional reprobate, driven to anonymity in order to conceal his ongoing lifestyle of motel break-ins and car thefts. Never owning anything, Troy has managed to stay inconspicuous his entire life by subsisting on an uncanny ability to take his livelihood from others. When a potential inheritance lures Troy back to his home town and his estranged brother, Harlan, his way of life and his confidence in it is threatened. In this Western set in the 1970s Texas flat lands, the town of Presidio is populated with Mexicans, Low German Mennonites, and native Texans--all attempting to gain some kind of control over their chaotic lives. VERDICT Kennedy (Kingdom of Invaders; Subwayland) creates a reality that blows desert dust into the eyes and cheap motel musk into the nostrils, successfully capturing the intertwining lives of sad sacks who are painfully and at times comically doomed. Those who enjoy classic Western "drifter dramas" will be sinfully satisfied.--Russell Miller, Prescott P.L., AZ

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2018
Itinerant car thief Troy Falconer has little need of possessions, yet his rootless existence consists of stealing clothes out of the seedy Texas motel rooms of similarly sized men before absconding in the victim's car. When Troy and his reticent, bighearted brother, Harlan, set out on an ill-fated car trip across the Panhandle in late 1972, hoping to locate Harlan's scheming wife, who has skipped town with his life savings, they inadvertently kidnap an 11-year-old Mennonite girl who is in the back of the stolen station wagon. The flinty and formidable Martha is a pistol in the mode of Mattie Ross in True Grit (1968). Kennedy employs a conversational and reflective tone as he skillfully explores the nature of guilt, identity, and grief in his assured debut. This deceptively polished confessional imbues the three-dimensional characters with humor, cynicism, and considerable pathos in artful contrast to the moonlike landscape of West Texas. As this tripartite group traverses the otherworldly expanse, a small ad hoc family emerges and, finally, a sense of belonging, however brief. For fans of Larry McMurtry and Philipp Meyer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 15, 2018
Two estranged brothers and an unexpected passenger embark on a road trip through Texas to recover stolen money in this strong debut.Troy Falconer first appears in notes he's writing to explain how and why he frequents motels to steal cars, clothes, and another man's identity. Two pages later an omniscient narrator describes Troy returning in November 1972 to his hometown in the Texas Panhandle for the first time in over six years. He and his brother, Harlan, have agreed to set aside grudges while trying to track down Harlan's wife, who ran off with most of the money left him by the brothers' father. Toggling between this narrative and the notes, Kennedy reveals one rootless man charting a larcenous course through America and one tied to a dot on the map: "I've spent my whole life here, Troy. Inside of a ten-mile radius," Harlan says. When Troy steals a car at a grocery store, the brothers are unaware that an 11-year-old named Martha is sleeping in the back seat. She adds a third narrative, of a father and daughter separated when he is jailed, wrongly, for kidnapping her, while she is placed with an aunt, whose Ford Country Squire station wagon catches Troy's eye. The feisty girl wants the brothers to take her to El Paso and her father, but they have another target because Harlan says his wife "said something about Presidio once." Kennedy's humor can be broad or sly. He reveals early on, for instance, the quest's overarching absurdity when Troy says he connived with the woman who married Harlan to steal the inheritance. But she lit out on Troy as well.Kennedy has a fertile imagination he lets drift into many beguiling detours, and the writing sparkles throughout.

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