Growing Up Dead in Texas Audiobook

Prolific, award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones deftly blends fiction and reality in this captivating novel about small-town paranoia and coming home. Twenty-five years ago in Greenwood, Texas, a violent fire erupted in the tiny cotton-growing community. No one ever took responsibility and no one was ever caught. Instead, the town moved forward as if nothing happened. Today, the embers still smolder, but a reckoning may soon be on the horizon.

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"I loved this, though I think Stephen Graham Jones has even more in him and hasn't quite hit his full stride. Still, I'll be reading all of his books, only a couple I haven't gotten to yet. By the end of this I was saturated with memories of small town Texas and cotton and families that run everything in a way that permeates every aspect of the story without being told really. It's like those memories are mine. Course Arizona and Texas aren't so different in some ways, and we're almost of an age the author and I. I don't know when I've read a book where the landscapes and music and memories and the catching of hornytoads made me feel so at home. I caught myself thinking that when he wrote he wanted to be the guy from Rosanne Cash's 'Seven Year Ache' I wondered if he didn't mean her dark-haired boy who played the Tennesse Flat Top Box. I knew the Tiffany song the girls were singing cause I sang it too, and the way the wind smelled maybe and the feeling of space and the road and the masculinity and the way people feel about land. So now I feel like I know about the farming and the joy of large machinery (I knew a little about that already) and god I want to hear rattlesnakes rattling from inside giant bales of cotton! This is all about families and power and land and a whole lot of hurt but you settle into that layer by layer and then you think about it a long time. Meanwhile, you can see the men in their dust and sweat and thinning hair under their hats and wore out jeans... yep. I loved this book. What gave me some small troubles was the structure and the back and forth between past and present didn't always work entirely I thought, I'm not sure who would tell a story quite like that. I did love the form of memoir though, and perhaps reading it while sitting with my mom in hospital made it harder to follow. Still, a hell of a book."

— Andrea (4 out of 5 stars)