American Owned Love is set in a town divided by a river and by race. Gay Schaefer is determined to ignore small town conventions and be 'original, graceful, adventurous'. This allows her sexual freedom whilst secretly meeting her husband for hotel trysts: Gay and her husband pretend to be divorced, thinking this will make things easier for Rita, their troubled teenage daughter. Rita is poised on the town's fault line: her best friend Cecilia comes from a Mexican family who have crossed to the respectable side of town, to the resentment of some left behind in the shanties across the river.
Gay's affairs begin to lead her out of her depth and she is worried by Rita's increasing distress. The resentments between Anglos and Hispanics, between Hispanics who have crossed the river and those who haven't, provide the background into which the teenagers' emergent sexuality introduces overwhelming tension. American Owned Love is a novel wonderfully concerned with growing up, with the mutual incomprehension between generations, with the terrors of everyday life. It is a confirmation of Robert Boswell's brilliance that he is able to evoke these dangers and then to resolve them with a genuine humanity. American Owned Love fulfils all the promise of Boswell's earlier novels: a major writer is emerging.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why compare the two works?,
By A Customer
This review is from: American Owned Love (Hardcover)
Authors must always deal with their past successes and failures. MYSTERY RIDE was a tremendous success; as such, readers will inevitably compare AMERICAN OWNED LOVE to it. But they are vastly different books. One might enjoy both (for a variety of reasons: the good prose and engaging characters in each, for starters). If you believe characters are at the heart of good fiction, you will like this book. If you want to be told how or what to think (or told what the black river has to "mean"), then look elsewhere. Look in your dream journal. Ask your therapist. While you're doing that, Boswell will quietly chip away at better questions: what it means to be human, what love is, what it does to us, and why.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but no "Mystery Ride",
By A Customer
This review is from: American Owned Love (Paperback)
I couldn't put it down but once I did, after I finished it, it didn't stick with me. Interesting characters and plot but what was the black river all about? Sorry, must have missed the symbolism there...
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining but not extraordinary,
By A Customer
This review is from: American Owned Love (Paperback)
An enjoyable read but not as haunting as "Mystery Ride." The characters were well developed for the most part (my favorite was Henry) but it didn't seem to go where it could have. And what was the meaning of the black river? Think I missed something there....a good book to check out at the library, but I wouldn't encourage buying it.
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