Why I love it

Andrew J. Graff
Author, Raft of Stars
I’m always game for a quest. Give me a group of underdogs with a sea or continent to cross, the promise of treasure and an arduous road, and I’m all in. The stakes are even higher when the underdogs are kids or teens—adventures like This Tender Land, classics like Huckleberry Finn. When I opened the first pages of Amor Towles’s newest novel, The Lincoln Highway, I had a feeling I was in for just this kind of experience—bighearted and hopeful, perilous and enlightening. The story delivered on all fronts.
I can’t remember the last time I cared more about the heroes of a book so thoroughly and quickly. The Lincoln Highway begins with eighteen-year-old Emmett, recently returned from juvenile detention in 1954, reuniting with his little brother, Billy, on their foreclosed Nebraska farm. The two boys are alone, but have each other. Emmett has big reasons to leave the state, and a plan. Billy has a plan too, a journey mapped by a mysterious series of postcards laid in a line on the kitchen table. When two other characters enter the story—acquaintances from Emmett’s recent past named Woolly and Duchess—a third path opens.
I loved these characters. I loved the landscape, the rich tapestry of mid-century Americana, prairies and cities. And I loved this quest’s opening promise: Four boys with places to be standing in a barn, sliding the tarp off of Emmett’s sole possession, a baby blue Studebaker, the dusty roads calling like a treasure map. I was thrilled to hit the road with this determined crew.