Weedeater: An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe
4.5/5
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About this ebook
A finalist for the 2019 Weatherford Award in Fiction, Weedeater is a contemporary story of love and loss told by a pair of eastern Kentucky mountaineers: Gene, the lovelorn landscaper who bears witness to the misadventures of a family entangled in drugs, artmaking, and politics, a family beset by both environmental and self-destruction; and Dawn Jewell, a young mother searching—for lost family members, lost youth, lost community, and lost heart.
Picking up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s acclaimed first novel, Trampoline, in Weedeater, the reader finds Canard County living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and the most turbulent and deadly phase of the community’s battle with opioid abuse. The events Gipe chronicles are frantic. They are told through a voice by turns taciturn and angry, yet also balanced with humor and stoic grace. Weedeater is a story about how we put our lives back together when we lose the things we thought we couldn’t bear losing, how we find new purpose in what we thought were scraps and trash caught in the weeds.
Robert Gipe
Robert Gipe lives and works in Harlan County, Kentucky. Pop is his third Ohio University Press novel. His first, Trampoline, won the 2016 Weatherford Award for Appalachian novel of the year. His second novel, Weedeater, was a Weatherford finalist. For the past thirty years he has worked in arts-based organizing and is the founding coproducer of the Higher Ground community performance series. He has contributed to numerous journals and anthologies, is a playwright, and is currently a script consultant on a forthcoming television show based on Beth Macy’s Dopesick. Author photo by Amelia Kirby.
Read more from Robert Gipe
Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pop: An Illustrated Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Reviews for Weedeater
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The second in Gipe's Canard County trilogy, this is a sweet, offbeat book about the many ways you can't save the folks you love—and also the shifting currents of motherhood and friendship, whether art or politics can redeem a body, class, drugs, community—the book is set in early 2000s Appalachia—and unrequited love. Along with the story itself, Gipe does a fantastic job with both the dialogue/dialect—no easy thing to do well, and he nails it—and the wonderful, fourth-wall-breaking, deadpan illustrations that help move the story along. This is way different from anything else I've read lately, compassionate and quirky without ever being cute, and I liked it a lot.