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In the year 1967, fifteen-year-old Robin drives an antique pickup truck west from Saskatchewan, travelling across farmland and on unmarked roads to avoid police. Like Odysseus striving toward home, he encounters trying situations: men on the run, hippies creating utopia, marijuana farmers, mechanical breakdowns, a raging forest fire. Robin passes through a massively changing society — a rural culture that, though eroding, hangs on to values of kindness and endurance, and one in which Robin must be both heroic and vulnerable.
A RARE MACHINES BOOK
More odyssey than road trip, Amaranthine Chevrolet is a vivid inquiry into a young man’s emerging sense of self. In spare and evocative language, Dennis Bolen sweeps you into the rhythm of the road, to a place located somewhere between memory and dreams, and there he reinvents the male protagonist in a miracle of a young man with an adamantine purity of purpose. A unique, fresh, and engrossing story.
Amaranthine Chevrolet is the story of a boy’s pilgrimage in an enchanted chariot like none other. Spare and incisive with all hell for a basement; this is prairie noir at its best.
Sure-handed storytelling that reads simply and cleanly and carries great depth and meaning in the telling, Amaranthine Chevrolet lingers and casts a ruddy western glow on the imagination.
With that spare style Bolen (Anticipated Results) conjures up the vast expanse of the prairies where the story starts; but that’s not to say he isn’t incapable of ornamentation. Sometimes, the narrative contains charming bursts of lyricism—“as the heretofore comforting silence vanished inside the ardent tintinnabulation, the vibration made him strangely know that others existed on this freshening morning”—and lines like this burst out of the prairie sparseness like song birds plunging from the branches of trees.
Amaranthine Chevrolet is well worth a read. Robin is easy to cheer for, and the other characters provide moments of humour and tenderness. When the young protagonist finally reaches his family, Bolen reveals what has motivated him and how he came to possess the Chevy. It makes for a heartbreaking final chapter.
On The Road meets Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in this off-road novel that is by turns comedic, touching, philosophical, heart-wrenching, heart-warming, and poetic.
In his new novel, established British Columbia novelist Dennis E. Bolen injects the iconic story of a quest journey with gritty solidity: immediate and intense, it is also, increasingly, thoughtful and introspective.