Keeping Things Whole

by Darryl Whetter

It's 1998 and Antony Williams is about to meet his match. A native of Windsor, Ontario, Antony is the child of a demanding single mother and an absconding Vietnam War resister who got too used to leaving home, country, and family. With a keen eye on the hybrid Windsor-Detroit landscape, backhanded affection for his hometown, and a growing understanding of his own family's place in its bootleg history, Antony makes his living as a house painter by day before catapulting loads of Canadian weed across the river to Detroit by night. Then he meets Kate Chan, a beautiful, street-smart law student, who calls his bluff and picks apart his personal mythology. Ultimately she presents him with his own hard choice and forces him to realize he's been smuggling much more than he knows. Keeping Things Whole recounts the arc of their relationship and is cut with Antony's entertaining manifestoes on marijuana, legality, art, theatre, sex, money, and lineage.

268 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2013

Reviews

[Nancy Patterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Distinctly Canadian, capturing what its like to live in a town close to the USA border... And the conflicts of living a double life, and entertaining read.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun book for me, it involved crime, some humor, and took place in the City of Windsor where I completed my undergraduate degree (roughly the same time that this story took place). I thought the writing was exceptional and I liked the thoughts of the main character on relationships. Where the book struggled in my opinion was the plausibility of the main character and how successful he was in his illicit business -hence, not giving it 5 stars.

Highly recommended!