So Long, See You Tomorrow

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, an adult narrator looks back at childhood and the lingering effects of childhood loss and displacement. He recalls his mother’s death, his father’s remarriage, and moving from a beloved home. The author also tells a parallel story of the scandal that befell his friend Cletus: his father shot his mother’s lover, and then drowned himself. For the narrator, his lost boyhood home is recalled like a dream of paradise lost, a mirage of another life: “I dream about it, the proportions are so satisfying to the eye and the rooms so bright, so… show more.

I love this book for its depiction of 1920s rural Illinois and its beautiful writing. My father was a boy during the 1920s, and this story of two friends, their friendship tested by a murder, connects with what I imagine my father’s boyhood to have been like and gives me insight into what he kept guarded throughout his life. Maxwell’s narrator reconstructs the facts of the murder in a way that keeps me on the edge of my seat in this story of youth and loss.