Deliver Thy Pigs, (Paperback)

Short version: Beautiful prose. Relatable characters. Complex pursuit of justice. Read this book. (and maybe suggest it for a book club) Long version: "Once his shift ended, Marco Polo Woodbridge shouldered the old BB gun from his father's attic and bicycled out to the nature preserve to take more pot shots at the slaughterhouse. He wished he could stop himself, but this habit of his felt so ... unquenchable. Not dissimilar to smoking. He did not feel like he needed to do it, nor did his soul really quiet by it, but some bit of him treated this habit like breathing and eating. Just something you do–line up the scope on the fake rifle and give J. Lowell's the proverbial bird one pellet at a time." How do we react to companies who wronged us? Should we appreciate exploitative factories just because they keep our small town afloat? Where's the line between revenge and justice? Will either satisfy the demands of grief? These questions and more are grappled with in this breakout novel by Joey Hedger. It's a story of place, in this case a stinky slaughterhouse town, but it's also a story of friendship, grief, and the pursuing (perhaps limping toward) justice. Hedger's descriptive prose brings this fictional town to place in a way that one can almost smell the stench. The writing style reminds me of a cross between Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Overstory by Richard Powers as it weaves together descriptions of nature, relatable inner dialogue, and symbols of destruction and hope. As a work, perhaps the best way to describe this is a portrait of Middle America capturing both its beauty and its melancholic longing. I would recommend this book to fans of literature and think it has a lot of potential for a book club. The characters are complex, the symbols seem clear enough to be identifiable, but could provide interesting discussion about their deeper significance. Even the enigmatic title provides ample ground for discussion. Try this book; you're likely to find pieces of yourself or people you know hidden between these covers.