Stations West

From Publishers WeeklyAmend's debut novel (after the collection Things That Pass for Love) is the thin and grim multigenerational story of a pioneer family hacking its way through the frontier states, beginning with the 1880 marriage of Jewish-Cherokee dishwasher Moshe Haurowitz to pregnant Irish prostitute Alice O'Malley in Orerich, Colo. After Moshe abandons Alice and baby Garfield, he works for the railroad and later returns to fetch Garfield, father and son eventually settling in Denton Station, Okla., where they form a business partnership with a family of Swedes headed by Fritz and Rika. Garfield, now a hotheaded adolescent, falls in love with Fritz and Rika's pregnant daughter, Dora, and runs away to ride the rails, changing his name and staking his fortune in oil before settling down in the land of misfits and can't-get-alongs. Amend dashes through some 50 years and four generations, but the brisk pace shortchanges drama and character development—except for Garfield, who emerges as a shrewd and forceful personality—and leaves the reader feeling underwhelmed by what could be an immersive epic. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review"...every page is a delight. Surprises await the reader at every turn..." --ForeWord Magazine, March 2010

"Allison Amend's Stations West is a wonder: a super-readable, super-smart debut novel that comes just when we need it most. It's the most vigorous, passionate, and enjoyable foray into America I've read in a long time--told in a voice caught up with the extraordinary act of recounting the whole story. You won't forget it." ----Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

"_Stations West_ is truly an American epic. It is the story of immigrants and natives, of the evolution of the land, of culture and of people, of attitudes and lifestyles, of belief, of family, of America itself. I know of no other piece of literature like it. Written in a style as starkly beautiful as the landscape of the Oklahoma territory it describes, Amend's prose is unflinching and unsentimental; it takes on difficult truths with wide-open eyes. I'm quite awed by the novel's tremendous reach and its generosity." ----Thisbe Nissen, author of Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night

"Allison Amend possesses the rare gift of being able to fully transport her readers to an uncharted land. Her version of nascent Oklahoma reshapes the mythology of the Old West, telling an enthralling family story that reveals the role of Jews in shaping the American frontier." ----Hannah Tinti, author of Animal Crackers and The Good Thief

"There are no other books like Stations West. It speaks to something new, a kind of Jewish Angle of Repose . . . Stegner mixed with Singer. It struck me throughout as beautifully written and this alone makes a serious contribution to literature. But novels should also plow new ground and this story certainly does this. Boggy and Moshe and Alice and Garfield are real to me--living and enduring a landscape that is as familiar to them as it is to anybody else out there. And this I appreciate." ----Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories

"What a lovely book. Allison Amend has just the right touch, and her people are alive on the page." ----Richard Bausch, author of These Extremes