Small Town Sins

“I can trace so much of my life back to a summer night when I was seventeen,” opens main character Nathan, and right away you’re reading through your fingers like watching a horror film. Nathan’s a good boy until that summer night, when racy LeeLee takes him to a party. One thing leads to another and next thing he gets The Phone Call: LeeLee’s pregnant and needs $1,000 to fix the problem. Nathan has $100. He has tough decisions to make and no perfect options, a problem faced by the other struggling characters in this book, all of whom are scraping by in Locksburg, PA. Years later, Nathan comes upon a chance to leave his troubles behind: when he rescues a man from a burning building, he finds a sack of money that he impulsively puts in his truck. Then we meet the other main characters, whose narratives alternate and overlap with Nathan’s: Paula, Nathan’s wife, a nurse who wants nothing to do with the money; Callie, a nurse who works with Paula and who wants to give a dying young patient one last chance at happiness, defying the girl’s fundamentalist Christian parents in the process; and Andy, a recovering heroin addict who, facing bottomless grief, puts his remaining days into punishing an evil man. New York Times editor Jaworowski’s characters are so real, their struggles so palpable, you won’t want to leave them. A must for fans of This Is Us.