Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg

Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg

Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • Published:
  • Dec 2010, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

Katherine is 17, living alone in the beautiful, desolate landscape of southern Arizona. Her mother is feckless, her father busy with his new family. Meeting Son, the scion of a local rancher, seems like deliverance. They marry and live as a family in his parents' venerable adobe house, but it soon becomes clear that Son is a man who, as his father says, has a "young heart near withered beneath the breastbone."

Katherine must find her own way during a dangerous months-long drought, when everything seems to be disintegrating around her. Susan Froderberg's incantatory language--and her deep knowledge of both the complexities of a small, deeply-rooted place and the human heart--make Old Border Road soar.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Told in a vernacular that mixes biblical grandiosity and down-home grit....A Southwest Gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore." - Kirkus

"Froderberg's novel is deliciously poetic, surprisingly timeless - though set in the present day - and undeniably western." - Booklist

"Seemingly important information is glossed over, and occasional shifts into nonlinearity are confusing. Too often the prose is indirect to the point of incoherence..." - Library Journal

"I read Susan Froderberg's fine and beguiling first novel a little bit, and a little bit more, and suddenly found myself in a beautiful and heartbreaking swirl of story and life and language and could not stop. The world therein is raw and urgent and yet adorned with element: burning and cooling, light and dark, droughty weather, delicate seeds greening, our perilous existence, our enduring sufferance." - Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star

"In Old Border Road, Susan Froderberg's remarkable feat of literary ventriloquism gives us two inventive and haunting voices to remember. One is that of Katherine, the young ranch bride striving for the language to fit her predicament; the other is the author's own, a fresh dialect of talent on the fiction scene." - Ivan Doig, National Book Award winning author of the novel, Work Song

This information about Old Border Road was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Elizabeth

Splendid
Old Border Road has exceptional descriptions of characters, situations, and Arizona scenery. The characters are unique, and the storyline is appealing.

The main character, Katherine, lives with her in-laws in southern Arizona and must work with them in their everyday routine of keeping up their ranch while her husband is habitually absent at night. Katherine has to work hard, deal with unhappiness, deal with loneliness, and with THE KNOWING. As time goes on, could her second thoughts as she walked down the aisle as a seventeen-year-old bride have been an omen for her life's path?

Katherine....aka as "Girl" learns how to rope cattle, ride horses, make dinners, repair clothing, and cope with a drought plaguing Arizona. All characters mesh well together even though they are distinct in their own ways.

Ms. Froderberg's style is splendid...her beautiful prose reels you into the tale and allows you to become absorbed in the lives of Girl, Son, and Rose's Daddy.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book...it is one you will want to read as well. 5/5

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.