I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the GO HOME by Terry Farish & Lochan Sharma Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Author: Terry Farish & Lochan Sharma
Pub. Date: August 6, 2024
Publisher: Groundwood Books
Formats: Hardcover, eBook
Pages: 304
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/GO-HOME-Farish-Sharma
In a world beset by anger and fear, what does it mean to protect one’s home and family?
Olive and Gabe ― her older brother’s best friend ― are deeply in love. They want nothing more than to make a home and family together, especially after the overdose death of Olive’s brother, Chris. It won’t be easy. Gabe works three jobs, and Olive still needs to finish high school, but their future together feels certain and right.
But when Samir Paudel moves into the house across the street, Olive’s and Gabe’s lives are disrupted. The Paudel house is overfull with family and friends, and they play loud music at all hours. Yet Olive is drawn to them, particularly to Samir’s little nephew, Bhim, and his grandfather, Hajurba.
Yet Samir’s very presence seems to awaken in Gabe an intense anger ― toward immigrants he believes are taking resources from White Americans ― resources that would have saved Chris and his own father, who has lost his job and is now struggling with ill health and alcoholism.
When Olive realizes that Gabe and his family are the source of escalating aggressions toward the Paudels, she no longer recognizes the loyal, loving boy she fell in love with.
1
OLIVE
Olive pedaled from her house in Creek Village, past the Day Night Store at the traffic light, and west into the country to Gabe Boudreau’s house. He lived in the sticks.
They all lived on fingers of land built up with ashes and stones and probably whatever washed in from the sea. Olive’s brother, Chris, always said they were just borrowing this land from the sea that surrounded them on the New Hampshire Seacoast.
“Hey, Olive,” Simone called. Gabe’s kid sister was a businesslike eight-year-old. She hung Olive’s helmet by its chin strap over her handlebar. She pulled Olive past the chickens and out to the dirt-bike track Gabe had built with a sandbagged perimeter.
Simone smelled like grass and mud and little-girl sweat.
“It’s almost summer. You got a job yet?” Olive said. She wore her hair in a messy fat braid and now bunched it up to get it off her sweaty neck.
“Silly,” Simone whispered. “But I do have a secret.” “What?”
“You’ll see. Also, I’m learning jumps.” Simone clamped on her boots with ankle guards, shin guards, calf guards. “You amaze me,” Olive said.
“I know,” Simone said. “Why don’t you move here? You and Gabe are like puffins.”
“What do you know about puffins?”
“They mate for life.” Simone tucked her chin down and lifted her gaze to Olive. Gabe and Olive had known each other all their lives and had been together a solid year.
Gaudy little chickens jerked their feathery selves around them.
Olive didn’t like chickens. Sometimes she pictured herself in a city job with fine-tipped pastel markers and open-toed heels. She and Gabe knew they were going to have different kinds of jobs. They liked that. And then they’d get to come home to each other.
When they were kids, she and Gabe and her brother covered the city on their bikes, from Creek Village, where the working-class families lived on the north side of the river. Or they rumbled across the lift bridge to the south side and a whole other world of the tourists and the swanky who lived in the big houses they could barricade from the sea when it rose.
Now here came Gabe in a spiral of sun. Simone wrapped her small fingers through Olive’s.
“You can watch me jump. Gabe built jumps with piles of dirt.”
“Coming,” Olive said, but her eyes were on Gabe. She liked watching his eyes take in a problem and crush it. She knew the smartest people were dirt-bike racers like Gabe. Enduro racing made them into engineers.
Now he stood there in shredded cutoffs looking like sand and sky with his thick, beach-brown hair and his blue eyes. “Where you been?” he said. He was eighteen, older than Olive, who had one week left of her junior year.
“You’re making fun ’cause I’m a schoolkid.” A smile she couldn’t hold in spread across her face.
Simone took her bike off the stand. Her hair flew in the wind behind her and she headed to the track.
Gabe was beside Olive, his mouth over her eyes and her cheeks and her mouth. She felt his hand under the fine silver chain she wore at her throat, like even that couldn’t separate them.
She’d keep a herd of chickens for this boy.
Nero, a cross between a Great Dane and a flop-eared hound, loped out to Olive, yelping with dog joy.
“New ones are Barred Rocks,” Gabe said, pointing to some chicks.
Olive’s fingers found the loops of his jeans. “You ever stop working?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” he said.
That was the Boudreaus.
They set to work together. Laid a new bed of hay for the cluckers, filled a low trough with water the chicks could reach. Hosed down the vegetable garden. Wrestled with the hose until they were both completely wet and their hair fell over their faces. They sprawled in the hay like puppies showing their bellies.
Behind the nearby pines, Simone was kicking up dust around the track.
“How many days left of school?” he whispered.
“Four.”
“Move out here.”
Her body said yes.
They stayed in the grass and warm sun, and their bodies fit together like the sea and the sky.
Finally, they sprang up and headed to the Boudreaus’ front porch, which was overgrown with tangles of vines. In the kitchen, Gabe and Olive started supper to help out his mom who worked at Home Depot. This was how it would be whenthey had their own place and their own kids.
Olive glazed the crust of a frozen chicken pot pie with beaten egg to make it yellow-golden and shiny. Gabe watched her. They both knew this was a Chris technique, and it was like a sign that Olive being with Gabe was all right.
With the pie in the oven, Olive settled her cheek beside his jaw and touched the freckles on his straight lips. He wrapped his arm around her waist.
“Someday I’ll build you a whole house,” he said. “A brand-new house.”
“We’ll be okay wherever.”
“There’s a manager’s job opening at the bike shop.” “You don’t have to take another job.” Olive took plates and forks to the table.
“It’s a decent job. If I get it, I’ll leave the gas station. Stick with me.” He held her with an oven mitt on his hand. “God, I love your eyes. Dirt brown. You’re the fuckin’ earth to me.” She shoved him. “Dirt! You’re the farm boy.”
When the pie was good and crispy golden, they sat around a knot-holed table by the sliding screen door. They could smell the pine forest and see the orange flash of an oriole. Julia, his mom, had come home and dropped her long body in a chair. Her face scrunched up in a yawn.
“Fecking unending day.”
“Here, then.” Gabe, sitting across from her, got up and mounded chicken pie on her plate.
She lifted her eyes to him. They were tired and crinkled and searing blue like his. But her whole face took him in, and she said, “I always liked you.”
“Hey, you, too, Mom.” Gabe gave her a small salute, and a dimple showed.
Simone scraped open the screen door, and when she pulled off her helmet, her blonde hair dropped down. They all broke into the pie. Olive sat between Gabe and his mom, and she and Gabe wrapped their feet around each other’s under the table.
“Remember the last time I made a real pot pie?” Julia asked. “Damn if the bottom of that old casserole dish didn’t give way and that pie dropped right to the floor.”
“I remember,” Simone said. “We were watching me on TV at the protest.”
Gabe sprawled with his arms reaching over the backs of the chairs on both sides of him.
“Simone carried a sign as big as her,” he said. “Hold the line with me, kid.” That easy smile.
Olive remembered the news footage. She’d watched it with her brother. Simone had been at an anti-immigrant rally with Gabe and Kyle, their dad, carrying a sign: This is our country. Think of your children. Olive could read most of Kyle’s T-shirt. Keep New England … The last word was hidden, but she knew it was White.
“What do they mean, think of your children?” Olive had asked her brother.
“It means spook ’em,” he’d said from under his cap. “Scare people, you got ’em.”
Just for a second at the table, Simone had worry in her eyes looking at Olive. Olive knew Simone was Gabe’s small hit man. If anybody crossed Gabe, Simone saw it. Sometimes she’d had that worry when Chris and Gabe talked.
“He’s my brother.” A milk mustache dotted across the little indent above her lip like Gabe’s. “You’re supposed to be true to your family. If you don’t have your family, who are you?”
Gabe leaned in toward Olive and brushed crumbly piecrust off a loop of her braid. He leaned back with that same straight smile, like he just liked the sight of her. She let him look, and her eyes laughed.
“You guys.” Simone rolled out of her chair.
Everybody laughed. Then talk slowed down. Nero fell asleep out flat at Gabe’s chair. An owl called from the woods. The chickens stopped their racket, tucked their tail feathers in for the night.
Julia’s chin started to drop to her broad chest.
“Wait. Don’t go to sleep!” Simone said. “I have a surprise. Come on!” She opened the sliding screen door.
It was going on eight but the days were long, and an eerie light was in the sky.
Julia sighed. “Oh, baby, I’m tired.” But Simone looked like an angel in that light. They all trudged out into the stillness. Julia touched Olive’s hand.
“You look like the moon,” Julia said. “All white and curved over my son with your head there on his shoulder.” Olive realized her shorts were white. Her shirt was white with small white straps that barely stayed on her shoulders. “Here we are,” Simone sang. “I made it.”
In the center of the dirt-bike track was a wire creation, and from the wire hung seashells and beads and other mysteries.
“It’s a wind chime,” Simone said. “For Chris.”
Olive felt her heart stop.
The shells clicked in the wind. Other things Olive couldn’t see clearly. Were those little pendants made out of jar caps? Simone had glued on old photos of Olive’s brother.
Around them all, a dozen battery-powered tower candles lit pictures of her brother in his canvas jacket that Olive now wore to school.
“I wanted to make you happy,” Simone said. “’Cause it’s June and it’s the one-year anniversary.”
Olive still froze.
“It’s nice.” Gabe broke the spell.
Olive stepped forward.
“Thank you,” she whispered. She could have picked up the candles and smashed them into the field rocks like grenades. She avoided throwing up.
Olive put her palms across Simone’s hands. Simone thought this up all herself, the little girl who had buried her dead pets in solemn ceremonies.
Olive felt Gabe’s large hands over hers. Julia wrapped her arms around them all. They made this knot in the middle of the dirt-bike track under the moon.
All of a sudden it was last summer. Last June. At Olive’s house, back in the garage that Gabe and Chris had turned into a dirt-bike shop. Working on bikes was like religion. All the crap you could put on a bike.
But Chris was also an addict. And last June in the shop, he overdosed, and they couldn’t bring him back.
After Julia and Simone went to bed, Olive and Gabe walked back out in the moonlight, past dirt-filled bags around the track. Then into the woods where Olive, Gabe and Chris used to go to call the owls.
Olive wanted to talk about Chris. Gabe didn’t want to, but she did anyway.
“He talks to me,” she said. “He just shows up and there he is, hanging out. Telling me what to do.”
“Talks to me, too.” Gabe’s voice was hoarse.
“What’s he say?”
“Usual bullshit.”
“No, what’s he say?”
“He says, ‘Get the fuck outta here. Take a year.’”
She shoved back Gabe’s cap so she could see his eyes in the moonlight. He had all the pain and anger from last June, right there, right back again.
He cupped his hands, let his thumbs lightly touch to make a path for his breath. And then he whistled the barred owl’s call. He got the rhythm and the pitch like Olive remembered. Four short syllables. Who cooks for you? Like Chris used to call.
Gabe pushed the white strap up on her shoulder and pressed his hands into her cheekbones.
“I’d come with you if you go,” she said. She breathed with the feel of his mouth on hers.
“First, you want to bring some of your things out here?” She nodded. “I’ll tell Mom that’s what we need to do.” An owl answered back. They stood still and quiet. The owl called again. And a third time.
Once was good. Olive didn’t know about three.
About Terry Farish:
TERRY FARISH is the author of The Good Braider (YALSA and SLJ Best Book for Young Adults), Either the Beginning or the End of the World (Maine Literary Award) and A Feast for Joseph (with OD Bonny and illustrated by Ken Daley). She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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Website | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub
About Lochan Sharma:
LOCHAN SHARMA was born in Nepal. His family was registered at Timai refugee camp after they were exiled from Bhutan. Lochan and his family moved to the US in 2009 and now live in Concord, New Hampshire. He is a student at Keene State College.
Giveaway Details:
1 winner will receive a finished copy of GO HOME, US Only.
Ends October 22nd, midnight EST.
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/e2389ba21868/?
a Rafflecopter giveawayTour Schedule:
Week One:
| 10/7/2024 | Sudeshna Loves Reading | Excerpt |
| 10/8/2024 | Book Review Virginia Lee Blog | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 10/9/2024 | Daily Waffle | Excerpt |
| 10/9/2024 | YA Books Central | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 10/10/2024 | Fire and Ice Reads | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 10/11/2024 | Edith’s Little Free Library | IG Post/TikTok Post |
Week Two:
| 10/14/2024 | Two Chicks on Books | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 10/14/2024 | Lady Hawkeye | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 10/15/2024 | @callistoscalling | IG Post |
| 10/15/2024 | TX Girl Reads | Review/IG Post |
| 10/16/2024 | Rajiv’s reviews | Review/IG Post |
| 10/16/2024 | Brandi Danielle Davis | IG Review/TikTok Post |
| 10/17/2024 | @enthuse_reader | IG Review/TikTok Post |
| 10/17/2024 | A Blue Box Full of Books | IG Review/LFL Drop Pic/TikTok Post |
| 10/18/2024 | The Momma Spot | Review |
| 10/18/2024 | Country Mamas With Kids | Review/IG Post |