Missouri Boy back

Imagine that cover with some of the leaves in spot varnish. Gorgeous, and what a truly special book this is.

Prologue to two lives:

"One falling slowly toward darkness.
"Two toward light.
"She sits in the back kitchen room of that little house in Missouri, my mother, her own mother's hands on Momma's swollen belly.
"A confusion of hands on swollen bellies.
"One dying grandmother bulging with the death growing inside her stomach.
"One glowing mother, spreading her thin time between grieving... and celebrating the twin heart-beats within her.
"We enter the world, my brother and I... with the circle of life wobbling unsteadily."

Over the course of ten chapters that span the course of his early life, Leland offers up the sort of moments that linger forever, each one recounted with a poetic passion as the glowing pictures pull far more than their feather-light weight.

Making paper aeroplanes and flying them outside with your brother under the loving gaze of your grandfather... Fireworks when life was simpler... Skinny dipping with your friends at the height of hot summer...

Then there are the sorrows, some quite unexpected, the hesitations for which you may never forgive yourself, and the betrayals that hit you hard. It ends with a journey across country on motorbike to meet up with a girl, the author assailed by memories and doubts, but when at the end the girl says, "You made it," and he replies, "Yes," I think he's talking about a great deal more than that single trip.