By: Virginia Reeves
Narrator: Dan John Miller
ASIN: B01BNWUT4K
Publisher: Blackstone
Publication Date: 3/1/2016
Format: Audio
My Rating: 4 Stars
Roscoe T. Martin, the son of an Alabama coal foreman, set his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the 20th century: electricity. It became his training, his life's work. But when his wife, Marie, inherits her father's failing farm, Roscoe has to give it up, with great cost to his pride and sense of self, to rescue the farm for the sake of his marriage and his family.
Realizing he might lose them all if he doesn't improve the place, he enlists the help of his black farmhand, Wilson, and begins to use his skills as an electrician to siphon energy from the state, ushering in a period of bounty and happiness on land that had been falling to ruin. Even the love of Marie and their child seems back within Roscoe's grasp. Then a young man working for the power company is electrocuted after stumbling on Roscoe's illegal lines, and everything changes: Roscoe is arrested for manslaughter; Wilson is leased to a coal mine; the farm once more starts to deteriorate without electricity; and Marie abandons her husband as he goes to trial, leaving him to face his 20-year sentence alone.
No longer an electrician or even a farmer, an unmoored Roscoe must now carve out his place in a violent new world. Climbing the ranks from dairy hand to librarian to "dog boy", an inmate who aids the guards to track down escapees, he is ultimately forced to ask himself once more if his work is just work or if the price of his crimes - for him and his family - is greater than he ever let himself believe.
Gorgeously spare and brilliantly insightful, Work Like Any Other announces a major work from an incredible young talent - a deeply affecting story of dispossession, injustice, and redemption that explores the lengths to which the broken among us push forward.
Review to follow.
About the Author
Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Her fiction has appeared in The Common and The Baltimore Review and has been short-listed for the Tennessee Williams Fiction Contest and the Alexander Patterson Cappon Fiction Award. She has spent the majority of her life in Montana, but currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, two daughters, and three-legged pit bull. Work Like Any Other is her first novel. Read More
