Ohio

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Markley, Stephen
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Markley, Stephen	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"The debut of a major talent; a lyrical and emotional novel set in an archetypal small town in northeastern Ohio--a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--depicting one feverish, fateful summer night in 2013 when four former classmates converge on their hometown, each with a mission, all haunted by the ghosts of their shared histories. Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. In the country's forgotten pockets, where industry long ago fled, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by suicide, addiction and a rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley's brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan. On one fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets, lost loves. There's Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to New Orleans, and now back to "The Cane" with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting the mother of her former lover; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he's tried to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel's shocking climax. At once a murder mystery and a social critique, Ohio ingeniously captures the fractured zeitgeist of a nation through the viewfinder of an embattled Midwestern town and offers a prescient vision for America at the dawn of a turbulent new age"-- Provided by publisher.
"On one feverish, fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rustbelt town they grew up in--a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets, losses and love"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

great submitted by kevinhe on July 26, 2019, 10:17am good to know our neighbor since we went Ohio quite often.

Stunning and heartbreaking submitted by jaromatorio on July 24, 2020, 11:18am Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a ride-or-die Ohioan, so this book has been on my #tbr list since the day it was published!!
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The book centers on one night in 2013 when four former classmates (about 10yrs post-grad) converge on their hometown in rust belt northeast Ohio. The tale flips back and forth from this single night to the protagonists’ school days, and delves into the youthful experiences that shaped each character and the much deeper issues that face them as they age.⠀
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Though my hometown was a little more urban and a lot more diverse than the fictional New Canaan that serves as the setting of this novel, so much of the town and its characters felt deeply familiar in a way that was both comforting and fairly unsettling. And, going into this read, I expected to see glimmers of my city and the people I grew up with. I knew I was going to read about the challenges facing folks living in a rough post-industrial post-9/11 city in the immediate aftermath of the '08 financial crisis. I was prepared for opioid addiction, veterans with PTSD, poverty—the whole gamut.⠀
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What I did not expect from this book (and what I was so thrilled to slowly uncover) was the deep, creeping mystery that lay beneath all of these surface issues and that really drove the narrative of this story forward. As much as I enjoyed learning about each of the characters and their perspectives and trajectories, what really made this book impossible to put down were the various unanswered questions and loose threads that only really started to become apparent about 1/3 of the way through the story. As the tale neared its close and everything started to come together, my eyes could hardly read the words fast enough to keep up with my impatient brain.⠀
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If you’re having a weird time already because the world is a nightmare right now I’d say maybe hold off on this one for a bit (tw for sexual violence and like...a lot of violence generally) but in regular life I would definitely recommend this book as one of the best contemporary social novels I’ve ever read!⠀

I hated this (but finished it for book club) submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on June 13, 2022, 10:02pm I 100% do not care about small town high school students’ drama or alcohol/ drug-induced ramblings. When a bunch of them come back to town/ bump into each other 10 years after graduation and lots of them have trauma reactions or are wildly drug addicted and spend all their time reminiscing about high school drama and sex and drug abuse, I care even less.

The book was divided into sections for each of four main characters, and it was almost physically painful to make myself pick up the book to read it for the first three. (I read it only because it was a book club book.) The fourth character was like watching a train wreck: self-destructively page-turning. I barely made it through.