REVIEW: Over Yonder by Sean Dietrich
It’s never too late to find purpose.
Woody Barker steps out of prison planning to live out his years on his houseboat docked on the Alabama Gulf Coast. As a defrocked priest with a heart condition and an ex-wife who still runs his life, he needs peace and a path to redemption.
Caroline Boyer is seventeen, pregnant, and stuck in a loop of bad choices. At her mother’s deathbed, Caroline finds herself at the center of an unexpected plot that has the potential to turn her world upside down. At the funeral, she discovers a father she’s never known . . . Whether she likes it or not, her life will never be the same.
Soon Woody, Caroline, and an emotional support goldfish named Gary are on a grand adventure through the Deep South. Chased by the men who are desperate to learn what Caroline’s mother told her before she passed away, they use every skill they have as a new family to stay one step ahead of danger. To make it worse, former parishioners of the church that cast Woody out are determined to throw him a welcome home party. As Caroline and Woody look for answers and try to avoid disaster, they also learn how to redefine family, hope, and faith they thought they’d lost.
CW/TW – domestic violence, violence in general, brief violence to a pet but pet survives, lots of smoking, teen pregnancy, mention of past rape, mention of past vehicular homicide, deaths from cancer and heart attack
“I don’t know much about God, Caroline. I wish I did, but I’m too dense. But here’s one thing I know. In life, every person is given one adventure. One big, scary, horrible, awesome, incredibly alarmingly, disturbingly beautiful adventure. It doesn’t look like an adventure when it’s happening, and it sure as hell doesn’t feel like one. But when you reach the end, something happens.
“All the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys, the agony and the ecstasy, the moments of beauty interlaced with suffering, you realize it all meant something. It wasn’t a test. It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t punishment. It was an adventure. And you only get one, so you’d better make the most of it. Because one isn’t nearly enough.”
Caroline was staring at him. “No offense, but that sounds like a load of crap to me.”
“Maybe it is.”
Dear Mr. Dietrich,
In the three books I’ve read of yours, there are often similar characters or characters with similar problems – older men in bad health with a lifetime of bad choices in their rearview mirrors, long suffering ex-wives or girlfriends, and (often) pregnant teens who’ve rarely had anyone in their corner to help them. Over Yonder fits right in.
After reading the blurb before beginning (because I just auto-requested it), I had to wait a while before things really got going. The threads of the story are first carefully spun and then gently woven together. This is a story that needs grace and patience. There is a lot of backstory but for some of it, it will take until almost the end of the book for it to be told which to my mind is better than a huge info dump at the start. We know the bare basics but will often not get the full picture until the perfect time.
I read a description of your compassion for your characters and that is perfectly said. These are definitely flawed human beings and that’s not even talking about the villains. Hero Woody is just getting out of a ten year stint in jail, pregnant Caroline has been called White Trash for a lot of her life and made the mistakes to show it, Woody’s (first) ex-wife was a drug addict, his (second) ex-wife is (in a whisper) called the Colonel because she likes to take charge even if no one has asked her to, Woody’s father has a wealth of wisdom and a prostate the size of a melon, and Caroline’s shitty baby daddy is a shit.
Oh, yes these people have and are often still making mistakes. They’re also human and don’t we all do stupid things at times especially if that’s all we know or we’ve had the deck stacked against us all our lives. But as we see in the book, when the rubber meets the road, people can surprise you. Strength and grace can emerge from the better angels of our nature. I had sympathy for most of them during the book or at least by the end.
The action, once all the strands join together and things begin to pop off, is fairly non-stop. During a calm moment, there’s underlying tension that maintains our awareness of simmering danger. I loved almost all the characters, to some degree, though of course a few need to be drop kicked. Yet I also felt that overall, the book has a sort of disjointed feel. It seemed that some characters and threads were dropped – for long periods or totally – or never figured as much as I thought they would. There were unexplained issues such as where Woody – three months out of prison and a priest before that, so not exactly rolling in dough – got all the money he was throwing around in the story. I thought it and Elizabeth even mentioned it but we’re never told where it comes from. And Gary the emotional support goldfish isn’t there nearly as much as I wanted before he disappeared from view. Maybe these and other issues were edited for space or have been addressed in the final version.
The writing is what I’ve come to expect: solid style with understated humor and deep affection for the South. I’m going to slightly alter a line I used in my review of Kinfolk and say this book is filled with love, smoking, regret, heartache, exes, anger, love, regret, smoking, family, lost love, some drinking, second chances, regret, smoking, family, prison, parole, love, and second chances. It shows that past mistakes can be atoned for, lives can be turned around, love can be found where you don’t expect it and grace bestowed when maybe you don’t deserve it but it’s given anyway. The epilogue is lovely. B-
~Jayne
And in the end, it came down to people. Life did. It wasn’t about what you had done. It wasn’t about what you had accomplished. It wasn’t about how much fun you had, how much money you made, or whether you left your family with a great life insurance policy.
It was about who you loved. Love was the only thing you could take with you.
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