American Salvage

By Bonnie Jo Campbell,

Book cover of American Salvage

Book description

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first…

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Why read it?

1 author picked American Salvage as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Loads of commentators are talking about the struggles of rural America, but Bonnie Jo Campbell brings those hardships to life in the stories in this book. She intimately knows her place—the rust belt counties of rural Michigan—and her characters are sharply drawn and utterly convincing.

She makes me care about each and every one of them, even when I disagree with them, even when I don’t really like them at all! Still, I understand and respect them, and I’m forced not to treat them as statistics but as human beings. I love the brutal honesty and hard-won moments of hope…

From Joe's list on books about rural America.

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