Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Master of a Difficult Environment, Jul 11 2003
This first novel begins with the image of wooly-bear caterpillars crossing a rural road. If this doesn't seem auspicious, read on. I found Q Road to be a generous surprise and I don't say this easily. The depiction of the extinquishing of a goldfinch's life is beautiful and perfect and right,though I fought it all the way. The depictions of the people and their sudden realizations are equally stunning. What it is to believe in God, what it is to love another person, to gasp even for air: all these are given to us by this young author. This is a monster, a wondrous, beautiful book.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The strange faces of love..., Mar 7 2003
As carefully stitched together as a patchwork quilt, with colorful squares made of quirky characters, the inhabitants of Greenland Township, Michigan, are bound by the commonality of their daily labor and innate love of their farmland. This is the heartland of America, land that has sustained generation after generation. But as much as a failing farm economy, suburbia encroaches upon this pastoral existence, and city people are willing to tolerate only so much discomfort in their newly constructed rural environment. Once sprawled across the countryside, secure from city confines, the old families are slowly replaced by pre-fab housing developments. Q Road's three main protagonists are strikingly different people, each with particular idiosyncrasies, forming their own core family: father, child-bride, and son, love filling the solitary loneliness so long entrenched in their hearts. The spirited 17-year-old Rachel, a new bride who has married for the security of owning land, smashes through life with no guidance or socialization, save that of her own invention. George Harland, her middle-age-plus husband, is a sixth-generation farmer who knows only that his days are suddenly more bearable with Rachel sharing their backbreaking work and love-drenched nights. George cannot imagine life without Rachel. When twelve-year-old David is drawn to the Harlands, it is for George's fatherly protection and Rachel's pure female strength, his own mother ever more distant and self-involved. On a clear day when trouble hovers in the air, David is the catalyst for catastrophe, his one breach of judgment forever changing the landscape of their future. For the three of them, life will never be the same again. The Darwinian inevitability of nature vs. progress lurks around the perimeter of Greenland Township and Campbell skillfully portrays the hardships and realities of farming, as even the vigorous landscape becomes a vital player in the drama. Campbell's reality is hard-edged and she never shies away from its blunt and often brutal surfaces. Yet the eccentric characters of Q Road fit snugly into the environment, their own edges sharpened early by experience. Q Road is like an Alice Hoffman novel with sharp teeth and a rapacious appetite. At the same time, the peculiar township inhabitants have many of the intransigent qualities of Carolyn Chute's Beans of Egypt, Maine. Sprinkled with quirky individuals, neighborhood malcontents and busybodies, Q Road is overflowing with the many faces of humanity, as they reach bravely toward their better selves. Luan Gaines/2003.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky, quaint and quite wonderful, Feb 11 2003
Campbell's book revolves around a quirky cast of characters in rural Michigan: foul-mouthed, child-bride Rachel, her husband George, and her best friend, asthmatic, 12-year-old David, to name a few. The story itself is not particularly remarkable, but Campbell's writing makes you want to not miss a moment.Rifle-toting Rachel, abandoned by her distant, fur-trapping mother, marries the much older George Harland, a down-on-his-luck farmer, because she wants his land. She grows to love him in her own weird, tacit way. She also loves David, who becomes even more devoted to the mysterious Rachel after his near-death experience in a burning barn. There are some more neighborhood characters thrown into the mix, but you get to know these three the best. There wasn't so much in the way of a plot, it was really just a simple story, beautifully written, about loving the place you live and the people who live there, about getting lost, even in familiar territory, and finding your way back with the help of family and friends.
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