I read Susan Froderberg's fine and beguiling first novel a little bit, and a little bit more, and suddenly found myself in a beautiful and heartbreaking swirl of story and life and language and could not stop. The world therein is raw and urgent and yet adorned with element: burning and cooling, light and dark, droughty weather, delicate seeds greening, our perilous existence, our enduring sufferance. --Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse (winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and a Borders Original Voices selection) and Far Bright Star In Old Border Road, Susan Froderberg's remarkable feat of literary ventriloquism gives us two inventive and haunting voices to remember. One is that of Katherine, the young ranch bride striving for the language to fit her predicament; the other is the author's own, a fresh dialect of talent on the fiction scene. -- Ivan Doig, National Book Award winning author of the novel, Work Song Told in a vernacular that mixes biblical grandiosity and down-home grit...A Southwest Gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore. -- Kirkus (starred review) Froderberg's novel is deliciously poetic, surprisingly timeless--though set in the present day--and undeniably western. -- Booklist Froderberg's shimmering debut set against the dusty, barren backdrop of the American southwest explores the joys and consequences of young love. -- Publishers Weekly The rural Arizona landscape echoes in every word of the sparse, beautiful prose...An exciting new writer to watch. -- Rebecca Shapiro, BookPage Ms. Froderberg superbly draws on the Sonora Desert's singular features to highlight Katherine's changing emotions. Her joyful honeymoon is set in a mountain lush with 'blue spruce, dwarf cedar, juniper'; but her marriage deteriorates as the heat wave 'drives desert rodents and millipedes to hole in the earth, singes wings of monarchs, silences chickadees, sends cacti into dormancy, has every animal panting.'...This stark and convincing portrait of Katherine's maturing from a 'lovestruck girl' to a self-reliant woman is captured in a splendor of naturalistic detail. Katherine's coming-of-age story is given additional dimensions by the background drama of the drought and the need to provide water to an expanding desert population...The hard lesson of Old Border Road is that there are endless enticements that lead men to dishonor. -- Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal This remarkable debut novel, the story of a girl, begins with an adobe house and a road that runs south to north...Susan Froderberg keeps circling back to beginnings...she starts Katherine's new life again and again, dashing hopes, revealing the meanness in Son, and the difficulty of making a living from the dry earth. -- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Froderberg is truly Cormac McCarthy's literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir...Although set in contemporary times, there is a timeless quality about Old Border Road... I was exceptionally moved when I came to the last line of the story, a sentence that touched me with its purity, subtlety, and pith. -- Betsey Van Horn, MostlyFiction.com This debut novel is a like a big budget western with the set-design Oscar in the bag. Everything looks authentic ...Ms. Froderberg isn't one to let up on the intensity; the weight of her words can feel biblical. -- Susannah Meadows, The New York Times This simple story is beautifully told. It takes place in a distinct landscape, alive with intense color, dense texture, and sharp sound...Froderberg writes movingly of the haze of happiness that is the honeymoon. 'It is rapturous and ordinary, detailed and blurry, seeming to go on and on for a long time, and it is too soon over in the way all time can be.' More moving is her description of how time moves later, after the betrayals. 'Days and nights go by, regardless. The days are but a form to prop us, a stay to prevent our undoing, the nights but a measure of distance and passing.' -- Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe Susan Froderberg's Old Border Road is a woman-finding-her-voice novel, but with none of the treacle or tropes of the genre. Froderberg writes with an elegance and originality that captivates...The story has heart, perhaps because in Katherine we find a character to rally behind without feeling as if we've been manipulated into doing so...She is spirited but humble, fallible but ultimately triumphant. -- Emily H. Freeman, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
