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Clog!
Eb McCourry’s final year of school is rushing at a frantic pace toward showdowns on all fronts. Living in a children’s home, he’s struggling for an identity at his new school and finds it with the football and square dance teams and with an English teacher who forces him to write better than he thought he could. But not all is well. Eb faces a gun, two pedophiles, a sociopathic teammate, growing pressure to win and a budding love affair with the lovely and brilliant Lizetta. His college football scholarship and the doors it can open are at stake and he must grow up quickly.
303 pages, Paperback
First published December 2, 2013
1 person is currently reading
5 people want to read
About the author
Dan Smith
4 books18 followersDan Smith is a long-time, award-winning journalist in Roanoke, Va., and a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame. He is an author, radio essayist, community activist, liberal voice, father of two and grandfather of two. Co-founder and former co-owner/editor of Valley Business FRONT magazine.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 24, 2013
One of my favorite authors, Joe Hill, recently tweeted, “Coming up with fresh story ideas is an overvalued skill. Coming up with fresh ways to telling them is an undervalued skill.” In “Clog!,” author Dan Smith has managed to achieve both.
“Clog!” could have been named “High School Football!” and may have sold more copies with that title. However, it’s the dancing that gives the story its soul even though the two sports (yes, both of them are sports) share about equal time in the novel.
Our main character, Eb McCourry, is an easy kid to like. He’s well-spoken, smart, athletic, romantic, compassionate, and a natural leader. But Eb doesn’t know that himself. At least not at first. He comes from a large, poor family who’ve recently lost their father when the book begins. Eb ends up staying at his aunt’s home during the summer to unburden his mother but ends up falling in love with Cranberry, N.C. He can’t stay with his Aunt through the school year, so Eb ends up in the local boy’s home and attending Toe River High School.
Toe River is where Eb discovers square dancing and instantly falls in love with the sport. Eb likes football, Eb is in love with square dancing. He loves the competition, the devotion, the culture, and the fact he gets to be in close proximity with young ladies.
The coach of the square dance team, Miss Lilly, wins Eb’s respect early and never loses it. (More than we can say for the football coach.) And Eb’s journalistic aspirations lead him to question why the school’s best coach, Miss Lilly, isn’t paid a dime while their mediocre football coach is paid well. Feminism and civil rights are an undercurrent in the novel largely based on the time-period and Eb is a natural liberal in the best sense of the word.
Essentially, “Clog!” is a coming-of-age story about a boy who’s torn in equal measure by football, square-dancing, and girls. Okay, may more than equal measure for that last one.
Regardless of the “resemblance is purely coincidental” disclaimer at the beginning of the book, “Clog!” is obviously autobiographical. I don’t mean that it’s the story of the author’s life, but that his story is a interpretive mosaic of his life experience. He wasn’t a square dancer, for instance, but went to a high school in a small North Carolina town with a high-caliber square dance team. Not everyone will notice this stuff, but having read Dan Smith’s memoirs “Burning the Furniture” the connections were easily made.
Dan Smith is a long-time journalist, emphasis on the long. So it’s no surprise that the story-telling is done in a near-documentary format. There’s even timestamps! But I think it’s a huge credit to the innovation and creativity of the novel. It took me a few chapters to adapt, but once the story found its rhythm it became a quick and pleasant reading format that often kept me reading for long periods of time. A “page-turner” some cliche-loving reviewer might say.
I mentioned that there’s a lot of football, and I gotta say that the games are some of my favorite sections. Dan really takes the reader inside the huddle and builds the drama up nicely. Even in games that are major blowouts he manages to show that football isn’t easy even when it looks that way from the sideline.
Now I’m going to complain. But let me be clear about what’s important. “Clog!” is a good read. It’s a fun read. It’s an interesting read. And it’s absolutely something the author should be proud of.
*Note: I've been informed that the wrong draft had been sent in for publishing, buyers should now be getting a fully-proofread edition.
My biggest complaint is the proofreading. The book is riddled with typos and various misfires beginning to end. I expect a few typos in novels, even from major publishers, but there comes a point where it goes from being a minor distraction to a major annoyance.
As an aside, I’m not sure if all the errors were caused by missed proofreading. I’ve noticed that books on my Kindle have a higher rate of errors than their print counterparts. It leads me to believe that reformatting from word-processor to ebook causes some problems. However, the amount of errors in “Clog!” couldn’t be explained by reformatting alone.
At times, the dialogue felt forced to me. Eb McCoury is a high school senior who chooses his words carefully, to a nearly unnatural degree. Also, the characters, teachers especially, tend to divulge large amounts of information as if they’re reading it from an encyclopedia. (Encyclopedias are books filled with information kids. Like the internet, but on paper.) As an aspiring writer, I can tell you that dealing with necessary info-dumps is a tough task. You don’t want long passages of exposition that look copy-and-pasted, so often divulging the information through dialogue is a good alternative. But I think Smith would have been better served to do so with smaller chunks of info spread over more narrative.
Lastly, the teen romance was a little much for me. I was actually happy when Eb’s love interest was no longer able to be physical with him. Some folks are going to like it. But I could have done with a few less references to teenage erections and pre-ejaculate incidents.
For fans of Appalachian culture, “Clog!” will be an enjoyable experience. That also goes for fans of independently-published literature and fans of interesting stories told in interesting ways.
“Clog!” could have been named “High School Football!” and may have sold more copies with that title. However, it’s the dancing that gives the story its soul even though the two sports (yes, both of them are sports) share about equal time in the novel.
Our main character, Eb McCourry, is an easy kid to like. He’s well-spoken, smart, athletic, romantic, compassionate, and a natural leader. But Eb doesn’t know that himself. At least not at first. He comes from a large, poor family who’ve recently lost their father when the book begins. Eb ends up staying at his aunt’s home during the summer to unburden his mother but ends up falling in love with Cranberry, N.C. He can’t stay with his Aunt through the school year, so Eb ends up in the local boy’s home and attending Toe River High School.
Toe River is where Eb discovers square dancing and instantly falls in love with the sport. Eb likes football, Eb is in love with square dancing. He loves the competition, the devotion, the culture, and the fact he gets to be in close proximity with young ladies.
The coach of the square dance team, Miss Lilly, wins Eb’s respect early and never loses it. (More than we can say for the football coach.) And Eb’s journalistic aspirations lead him to question why the school’s best coach, Miss Lilly, isn’t paid a dime while their mediocre football coach is paid well. Feminism and civil rights are an undercurrent in the novel largely based on the time-period and Eb is a natural liberal in the best sense of the word.
Essentially, “Clog!” is a coming-of-age story about a boy who’s torn in equal measure by football, square-dancing, and girls. Okay, may more than equal measure for that last one.
Regardless of the “resemblance is purely coincidental” disclaimer at the beginning of the book, “Clog!” is obviously autobiographical. I don’t mean that it’s the story of the author’s life, but that his story is a interpretive mosaic of his life experience. He wasn’t a square dancer, for instance, but went to a high school in a small North Carolina town with a high-caliber square dance team. Not everyone will notice this stuff, but having read Dan Smith’s memoirs “Burning the Furniture” the connections were easily made.
Dan Smith is a long-time journalist, emphasis on the long. So it’s no surprise that the story-telling is done in a near-documentary format. There’s even timestamps! But I think it’s a huge credit to the innovation and creativity of the novel. It took me a few chapters to adapt, but once the story found its rhythm it became a quick and pleasant reading format that often kept me reading for long periods of time. A “page-turner” some cliche-loving reviewer might say.
I mentioned that there’s a lot of football, and I gotta say that the games are some of my favorite sections. Dan really takes the reader inside the huddle and builds the drama up nicely. Even in games that are major blowouts he manages to show that football isn’t easy even when it looks that way from the sideline.
Now I’m going to complain. But let me be clear about what’s important. “Clog!” is a good read. It’s a fun read. It’s an interesting read. And it’s absolutely something the author should be proud of.
*Note: I've been informed that the wrong draft had been sent in for publishing, buyers should now be getting a fully-proofread edition.
My biggest complaint is the proofreading. The book is riddled with typos and various misfires beginning to end. I expect a few typos in novels, even from major publishers, but there comes a point where it goes from being a minor distraction to a major annoyance.
As an aside, I’m not sure if all the errors were caused by missed proofreading. I’ve noticed that books on my Kindle have a higher rate of errors than their print counterparts. It leads me to believe that reformatting from word-processor to ebook causes some problems. However, the amount of errors in “Clog!” couldn’t be explained by reformatting alone.
At times, the dialogue felt forced to me. Eb McCoury is a high school senior who chooses his words carefully, to a nearly unnatural degree. Also, the characters, teachers especially, tend to divulge large amounts of information as if they’re reading it from an encyclopedia. (Encyclopedias are books filled with information kids. Like the internet, but on paper.) As an aspiring writer, I can tell you that dealing with necessary info-dumps is a tough task. You don’t want long passages of exposition that look copy-and-pasted, so often divulging the information through dialogue is a good alternative. But I think Smith would have been better served to do so with smaller chunks of info spread over more narrative.
Lastly, the teen romance was a little much for me. I was actually happy when Eb’s love interest was no longer able to be physical with him. Some folks are going to like it. But I could have done with a few less references to teenage erections and pre-ejaculate incidents.
For fans of Appalachian culture, “Clog!” will be an enjoyable experience. That also goes for fans of independently-published literature and fans of interesting stories told in interesting ways.
Displaying 1 of 1 review