The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Amy   

historical fiction, adventure

After Emmett’s release from a juvenile detention camp and the death of his father, he and his 8-year-old brother, Billy, plan to drive from Nebraska to California along The Lincoln Highway in order to start their new life together.  However, before their new adventure can begin, two of Emmett’s friends from the detention camp appear with their own plans. While on the way to the train station to drop off his friends, Emmett is blindsided by betrayal and must figure out how to continue on his journey with Billy.

What a marvelous novel! I love a good adventure and this novel is full of good adventures.

Just when I thought I knew how things would go, Amor Towles would surprise me…all the way up until the very end! I had not expected Towles to keep me pleasantly surprised because I was disappointed by A Gentleman in Moscow which had been too slow-paced and plotless for me. Thankfully, The Lincoln Highway has plenty of forward motion and a storyline which kept me hooked. I loved the characters and had to know how things would turn out for all of them. 

Sometimes, Towles would take the story off on tangents that made the novel feel like a bunch of short stories strung together.  This occasionally ruined the forward momentum. Although the backstories ended up filling in more details about various characters, all of these tangents (and a key point in the novel I cannot specify without giving something away) are the main reasons why I’m not giving this novel 5 stars.

Towles’ command of the English language is stunning. There are few authors who make me truly appreciate their faculty of vocabulary and sentence creation.  Towles is one of those people.  His writing doesn’t get in the way of the story at all but it makes the tale that much more fun.

The novel started with Emmett’s point of view but then switched between several other characters’ viewpoints.  Unexpectedly, after thinking Emmett was the protagonist of this novel since his story was the first to which the readers were introduced, it began to seem that Duchess might be the protagonist. After all, his sections were the only ones written in first person. But then Sally’s sections were also in the first person.  How curious.  I feel this technique helped to keep several characters feel equally weighted. Although, to me, Emmett was definitely the star. I look forward to discussing this aspect with my book club.

Some topics and themes that were revisited more than once in this novel were routine days vs. experiences that break a person out of their everyday life,  orphaned children, men stepping in to be surrogate father figures, Independence Day, Abraham Lincoln, and, of course, adventure and travel.

The main narrator of the three in this audiobook was Edoardo Ballerini who I have loved in other audiobooks.  He did a terrific job with voice acting and giving most characters their own voice.  I give him an A+.  The other narrators were Marin Ireland and Dion Graham, both of whom I’ve enjoyed in other audiobooks, as well, and they did a great job with their small roles in this one.  I’ll give Graham an A+ but am only giving Ireland and A because I thought her acting was a little over the top sometimes. I would've liked to see Sally slightly less angry. Honestly, I don’t think this novel needed three narrators and feel strongly that Ballerini could’ve handled all of it. But it was a great production.