The Rhythm of the Road: A Novel: Amazon.ca: Albyn Leah Hall: Books

From Publishers Weekly

Raised on the road, Josephine Pickering loves her truck-driving daddy, Bobby, even though his sometimes-dark moods make him go silent. The only parent she's ever known (her mother abandoned the family shortly after Jo's premature birth), he lives and breathes country music and takes her with him on his truck routes though the U.K. where he picks up pretty hitchhikers, like singer Cosima Stewart. Jo, now a teenager, is discovering her sexuality and her independence, which isn't the easiest thing to do without a mother. She nurtures an infatuation with Cosima and her band, gets Bobby to take her to their shows and glows under their kindly attentions. When Bobby bottoms out the day after Jo loses her virginity to Cosima's boyfriend, Jo falls apart: she follows Cosima to California and spirals dangerously out of control. Her crackup, though, has its bonuses. Despite her violent outbursts, Jo is never malicious, and her most shocking acts are, in the end, a cry for love and for help. With its echoes of memories, country music and the love between a father and a daughter, Hall's debut manages to be both poignant and unsettling. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Jo Pickering was abandoned by her mother at birth and raised by her father. Bobby, a truck driver, takes his daughter with him everywhere as he attends to his routes in England and Ireland. Once a guitar player, he has a habit of picking up hitchhiking musicians. When he picks up Cosima Stewart, a country-western singer from Texas, the impressionable 12-year-old becomes infatuated with her and her band. Jo convinces Bobby to attend one of the woman's performances and becomes starstruck when Cosima and another performer take her under their wing and teach her how to apply makeup and dress like they do. But Jo's attachment soon becomes a compulsion. She is desperate in her search for something that Cosima and even Bobby can't give her, and she spirals downward into increasingly destructive behavior. Events come to a head when Bobby mysteriously disappears and Jo must find ways to deal with her feelings of total abandonment. This is a compelling read about a strong girl determined to survive in a world that has not been kind to her. As Jo makes some serious mistakes in her search for love, she begins to see herself in a different light. This impressive first novel is strongly written—the characters' emotions feel genuine, the dialogue is believable, and readers will care about Jo.—Catherine Gilbride, Farifax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Written from the perspective of Jo, daughter of a Northern Irish father and an American mother, Hall's debut involves a lot of driving and country music. Jo is an awkward preteen ridealong in father Bobby's truck. On the outskirts of Manchester, England, Bobby picks up a hitchhiker from Texas, country singer Cosima Stewart, who lives in London with her English boyfriend and bandmate in an alt-country band. As it happens, Bobby once played guitar in an easy-listening cover band. During a gig at a nondescript hotel, he met California art student Rosalie, whom he married when she became pregnant with Jo. But Rosalie went home, leaving Bobby the baby. From her infancy, daughter and dad have been inseparable road companions. Now things get a bit more complicated. The plot-heavy novel is full of flesh-and-blood characters and genuine surprises, demonstrating that Hall has a particularly good ear for dialogue and dialect. Taking us on a wild, unpredictable ride, this is, by any measure, an impressive debut. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Praise for The Rhythm of the Road:

"I have not stopped thinking about Hall's beautiful and engrossing novel. Her chronicle of a young woman's descent into madness is so rich in compassion...it should be required reading. A memorable and moving work of art."--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

"One of those rare literary novels--a fascinating story that keeps you gripped to the end, written in some of the finest prose I have read in a long time."--Andrea Levy, author of Small Island

"Stunning. Hall unfolds with marvelous authority a vivid, funny, touching, and suspenseful world of wonders."--Valerie Martin, author of The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories

"Albyn Leah Hall has written a wonderful, full-hearted story, with one of the most memorable heroines in recent fiction. Everyone deserves to read this fine book, and this book deserves to be widely read."--Hilma Wolitzer, author of The Doctor's Daughter

Book Description

The mesmerizing debut novel about driving trucks, loving music, and growing up.

A truck driver's daughter who grows up in the front seat of her father's truck, Jo shares her father's love of country music, junk food, and the open highway. Jo's life is a perfect slice of Americana, except that their "open road" is in England, and her father--the gentle, melancholy Bobby Pickering--is from Northern Ireland. The only truly American thing about Jo is her mother, whom she has never met.

Jo is twelve when she and Bobby pick up hitchhiker Cosima Stewart, an American country singer whose band is touring England. They become dedicated fans, and Cosima, touched by the unlikely duo, comes to regard Jo with an indulgent, even sisterly, eye.

But when Jo is sixteen, Bobby sinks into serious despair and Jo seeks refuge in Cosima and the band. When Bobby disappears, Jo's adoration becomes obsessive as she follows her idol all to the way to California. Here, in the sweltering Mohave Desert and alone for the first time, Jo must face the painful truths of her own life, the mother she has never known, and the father she can't force from her mind. With shades of Zadie Smith and Mark Haddon, Albyn Leah Hall's powerful debut is a page-turning study of what frightens us about one another and ourselves; of how we run away and what we can't, ultimately, escape from.

About the Author

ALBYN LEAH HALL was born in New York and lives in London. This is her U.S. debut novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

1998

I was twelve years old when Cosima first rode with us.

I hadn't heard of her then. Nobody had. She was just another girl, a hitchhiker with a name you might not remember.

A few things were different about her. She was American, but it wasn't just that. On the road, we met just about everybody: Welsh people and Irish people and Scots, German people and Spanish people and Americans and, of course, people from every part of England. The American hitchhikers were mostly the natural-looking kind, all denim and well-brushed hair, who could have been English apart from flat, unfunny voices and a dislike of our food, like beans on toast or Marmite. More than one of them tried to tell me that pretzels were better than Twiglets and that the Little Chef wasn't like a real American coffee shop. I told them it wasn't trying to be.

Cosima was a cowgirl, at least to look at. She wore a cowboy hat and a belt with a brass buckle. She wore a suede jacket, its fringe damp and tangled from being sat on in so many cars and lorries (or trucks, because they didn't say lorry in the U.S.A.). Her accent wasn't broad, but her voice had gaps in it wide enough to park a lorry in. I'd ask her a question and she wouldn't say anything and I'd think she hadn't heard me. Just when I was about to ask it again, she would answer. Cosima always kept you waiting, even when she was right there next to you.

The second thing was her fiddle. The road had its musicians--it was full of them in summer--but they were mostly boys with guitars or the occasional girl with a guitar. Bobby used to play the guitar once, and he liked to ask what kind of guitar he or she was carrying and maybe have a look at it if we stopped for a cup of tea. We'd met boys with fiddles, but not many girls.

It was six years ago, but I remember everything about that day. We had eaten our lunch. We were seventeen miles north of Birmingham. We were listening to Charlene Sweeney, our favorite country singer. The cars were like slugs all around us, creeping along in the warm, grimy rain. I had that feeling I had in my stomach that I got when we weren't moving. It was a stuck and heavy feeling, as if I'd eaten bricks.

She stood with her thumb out, a slim, neat, cowgirl-looking girl, sandy hair to her shoulders. I turned down the volume on Charlene Sweeney.

"Stop, Bobby."

He stopped. I shifted over to the flat area between the seats. A boy sat on the grass behind her, or a kind of a boy. He had bleached hair and he wore eye makeup. Sometimes girls pretended to hitch alone, when really there was a boy just behind them. But this boy didn't seem interested in us. He got up to read our registration plates and he wrote something on a piece of paper.

She climbed up beside me. She had green eyes, wide lips, and a flat nose--a little too flat, which is what kept her from being an absolute beauty. She was about twenty-four years old, maybe twenty-five.

Bobby leaned across our laps to open her door again and shut it properly because there was a knack to it that nobody got except for him and sometimes me. He loosened her seat belt to give it more slack. She watched his hand as he did this. She sucked her stomach in so that it didn't touch his hand.

"I'm Cosima Stewart," she said. "Thanks for the lift. My friend's got your license-plate number in case anything happens."

It was a funny way to say hello. What did she think would happen? There were bad men on the road, but they didn't have kids with them. Bobby was in no way dodgy, and he was the safest driver she would ever meet.

"Right enough." Bobby wove us into the middle lane. "It's nice to meet a girl who takes care of herself. Not like that poor wee thing in July."

Cosima Stewart looked confused.

"He's talking about a girl who was found in a bag in a ditch in Oxfordshire," I explained. "We knew that girl, or we knew her when she was alive. We gave her a lift once."

"Did you." She clutched her handbag to her lap.

There wasn't much talking after that. The rush hour cleared and we were quiet with just the motorway sounds. Her jacket smelled nice, like trees after rain. I wanted to ask her about the boy with the eye makeup, if he was her boyfriend. He didn't look like a boyfriend to me.

But it was she who asked me a question first.

"Do you go to school?"

I was disappointed. This was the one they all asked.

"Sometimes."

"And yourself, Cosima?" asked Bobby. "What do you do?"

"I'm a singer-songwriter. I'm in a country-and-western band."

He took his eye off the road just long enough to look at her. "Aye?"

"Listen." I turned Charlene up just as our favorite song came on, "I Ain't Makin' No Hay."

"Charlene!" said Cosima. "She's the best! I love that harmonica intro."

Though we had listened to "I Ain't Makin' No Hay" more times than I could count, I'd never thought, Oh, I love that harmonica intro. But now that she'd said it, I could see that it was very much a thing to be loved, wailing happy and sad through the drums in a happy wail. Cosima strummed her fingers on the dashboard and Bobby drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. We sang along, the three of us:

I ain't the kind of girl

To sit around all day

Waiting for a boy to pick me up

In some old Chevrolet . . .

I got wheels of my own and I'm never at home

And I live my life on the road.

So if you wanna fuel my desire

Don't change my tire

You just gotta love my highway . . .

'Cos unless you got power

A hundred miles an hour

I ain't makin' no hay!

I thought of Cosima before she met us, driving on the wrong side of the road like they did over there, playing the song over and over until she had all the words. I thought of us doing the same thing, here on the M1 or M6, maybe even on the same day.

"Do you like Alison Krauss?" I asked her.

She seemed to shake her head, as though she was about to say no. "Alison's the best."

"What's your favorite album of hers?"

"That's hard."

"I like Too Late to Cry the best."

"Jo," said Bobby, "you told me that So Long, So Wrong was your favorite at the minute."

"I did not."

"You did."

We passed a sign: manchester, 36 miles.

"I'll get off at Manchester," said Cosima.

I started going through all the CDs, as if I could make her stay by finding the other good ones.

Usually, when we picked up girls, I enjoyed them for a while. I liked sitting next to someone different for an hour or two. One thing I particularly liked was being near to the hair of other girls. I had hair like my dad's--brown, gloppy hair that just sat there, neither short nor long--and I was always interested in how older girls wore their hair, even when the girls themselves weren't so pretty. Most girls had more definite hair than mine: straight or curly, long or short, a pure color like black or ginger or yellow, even if it was dyed to make it that way.

And yet we usually ran out of things to say pretty quickly. Most of them didn't like country music, which made me feel funny when Bobby put it on. My bum would begin to hurt from sitting on the hard seat. By the time we dropped them off, I was ready to see them go.

Every now and again they stayed the night. There was one who rode all the way to Inverness with us. We didn't sleep in the lorry that night, or even in the truck stop. We slept in the Trusthouse Forte Hotel, which was too expensive really, and I didn't notice her paying anything toward the bill. I had my own room and Dad shared a room with her. In the morning she had breakfast with us. I didn't talk at all then, not out of shyness but because I didn't want to. The morning made her look whiter and fatter. She dipped her toast in her tea and dribbled her eggs with tomato catsup. She kept staring at Bobby and I felt sick looking at her.

After that we'd see her sometimes, at the same junction we'd picked her up at, near Wakefield. She was there so much I wondered why we'd stopped for her when so many drivers didn't. Each time we'd swing round the roundabout, she'd be looking my way, but it wasn't me she was looking for. She was standing up tall, trying to look at Bobby.

"Poor thing," he said. "Every time we see her, she's holding a different sign."

"Why?"

"Going nowhere, I suppose."

Cosima was definitely going somewhere. She had gigs and places to go to, and another country waiting for her to come on home.

Twelve miles south of Manchester, Bobby's hand was tight on the wheel. His knuckles were white, and I could hear him breathe. He wanted a cigarette, but he never smoked with girls in the cab, unless they were smoking as well. When Bobby wanted to smoke and c...

The Rhythm of the Road: A Novel [Hardcover]