Amy Fladeboe: Let the Soil Rest, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Blurb

Reaching across miles and memory to deconstruct the American Dream in the Midwest Rust Belt

Arjan, a teen refugee from postcommunist Albania, and Jess, a Midwestern high schooler, strike up an unlikely friendship working a seasonal job on a farm in Michigan. Now in their thirties, the two have taken different paths---he chasing the American Dream with a running rotation of day-labor gigs, and she living on the road and off the grid, trying to escape the very same ideal. When Jess lands in Hamtramck, just a few miles from her suburban Detroit upbringing after years wandering, they find themselves trudging the same unplowed sidewalks, spinning loads at the same laundromat, and picking the same jukebox songs at the local dive. Both are haunted by the ghosts of childhood traumas, a chorus of the collective unconscious that takes us from the Albanian coast to the Rust Belt heartland. So near one another and yet so far apart, they must reach across miles and memories to discover that the most important voice in our heads is our own.