Pushing Back

The Boone Series #1

by Jim Hartsell

The Boone Series is the story of a teenager on the fringes of society. He doesn't have looks, or money, or education going for him, but he's a decent human being trying to grow up with the odds stacked against him. He is often belittled or ignored, but like others out there on the edge of things, he has a story that deserves to be heard. "Pushing Back" is told from Boone's point of view.



The first book in the series finds Boone at sixteen years old, in a family he can't wait to escape. His father is an angry drunk who scrapes out a living doing farm work and takes out most of his frustration and rage on his family. Boone's mother is a passive sort, unable or unwilling to stand up to her husband, and his sister is only seven, so he feels like he can't leave. Then, in one weekend, his family disintegrates around him and Boone finds himself alone for the first time in his life.



Soon he begins to realize how much of his father's anger and mistrust is also a part of him, and much of his struggle to become an adult revolves around trying to let go of most of what his daddy taught him. Circumstance brings him into contact with an elderly neighbor, and he and Gamaliel form an unlikely friendship. Gamaliel's son-in-law has nothing but contempt for Boone and the conflicts with him bring out the worst in Boone's character.



Boone's low social standing and his inexperience with most kinds of relationships makes his growing involvement with Nancy, a former classmate, full of stumbles and missteps on his part and a determination on hers to make things work, even though she has her share of normal teenage insecurity as well.



A decent person at heart, Boone's battle with his inner demons and his almost complete lack of knowledge about the adult world make his progress intermittent at best, full of setbacks often of his own making. He approaches maturity clumsily, but when he can figure out the right thing to do, he usually does it. Unfortunately for him and those around him, sometimes his anger and insecurity get in the way.

Genres: Fiction

322 pages, ebook

Published November 15, 2018

About the author

Like most of us, there are many descriptors that apply to me: husband, father, grandfather, voracious reader, and average hammer dulcimer player are a few of them. I also write, concentrating on Southern fiction and children’s books.
During my seven decades I have lived in a total of three counties, all in East Tennessee, and all contiguous; in one of those counties is the farm that’s been in our family for five generations. I have deep roots in this area. My immediate family consists of my wife of 40+ years, my two children, their spouses, and, at the moment, a total of six grandchildren. I have been assured that six is it, but I remain skeptical. My wife and I share our home on House Mountain with a cat and two shelter dogs.
My professional career was spent in education, working with teens in various treatment centers, locked units, residential facilities, and public school alternative classrooms. These decades spent with teens who were characterized as losers at best and dangerous at worst taught me much about resilience, strength, and bravery, and helped form the concept of the main character in the Boone series. It has been said that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they aren’t true, but that they are incomplete. Certainly this is the case with the young people I spent so much time with, who are more like the rest of us than not.
I have a beautiful family, all the necessities of life plus a few luxuries, a fine circle of friends, and time to write books, play music, and enjoy the moments as they present themselves one by one. By any measure that matters to me, I am a very wealthy man.

Reviews

[Tilmer Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this story. Hartsell has a prodigious talent for painting character portraits from a first person perspective. The central character, Boone, is three-dimensional, beautifully imperfect and wholly engaging. He is a teenage boy who is forced to embrace adulthood ahead of schedule due to tragic circumstances in his life. I was riveted to Boone's psyche and, even though this sounds completely like a cliche, I could not stop turning the pages.
First person narrative is notoriously hard to pull off convincingly. Hartsell nails it. I felt like a part of Boone - a confidant, if you will. By the time I got halfway through the story I felt like he was a good friend telling me all about his hopes, worries and challenges. He carries the optimism of youth clouded by the harshness of the reality around him. His life is not easy by any stretch, but he is strong and carries on. Tragedy hammers him. Uncertainty rails against his peace of mind. His father's darkness and his mother's distance haunt him. Still, hope remains.
Life remains. Boone perseveres.
I really enjoyed this book. I flew through it. It was almost over too soon. Highly recommended!
Just for you parents out there : This book is appropriate for mid-teens and up in my opinion. There is sparse mild profanity, some violence and some very light sexual situations - nothing explicit.

[Dwayne Fry · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were hints of a good story in here and there, which kept me reading. But, those hints were short-lived and didn't deliver much of a punch.

The book starts off fairly good. A kid's mom runs off and his dad kills himself. There was promise of an interesting story here. How is this sixteen year old boy going to get by on his own? What if someone catches on and tries to get him to leave his farm? Yet, none of that really materializes. The kid seems to fall into money whenever he needs it, so he's able to buy groceries, keep the lights on and so on. There's no real struggle. The author seems to be afraid to challenge Boone, the main character.

Boone spends an awful lot of time farting around his farm, doing nothing. He goes and checks on his pond to see if it's there. He goes to check his dad's grave and finds it still there. Boone spends a lot of time watching TV, napping, eating pizza, and drinking "shine" (moonshine). The book would have worked a whole lot better as a novella by trimming all this pointless meandering around the farm. Boone even drops out of school to prevent us from having him interact with anyone interesting.

Boone has a neighbor, who is pretty much like himself, only much older. Boone goes up to visit with his neighbor, who also lives alone and doesn't seem to have much going on in his life, either. The old man yells at Boone for coming to visit, but Boone keeps going back for some reason.

The book becomes laughably unrealistic when a lawyer shows up on Boone's doorstep. He was looking for the old man and went to the wrong farm. So, the lawyer suggests Boone should look in on the old neighbor now and then. The old man's daughter pops in for a visit and suggests the same thing to Boone. Is there no one else in this county? Why entrust the old man's health and welfare to some kid who barely knows him?

There's a girl Boone knows named Nancy who comes around now and then, spends about two minutes with him and then freaks out and leaves again over some little thing. She does this repeatedly. The author seemed to be in a hurry to get back to scenes of Boone drinking shine and checking to see if his pond is still there. Why waist a lot of pages on interaction with another character?

And then the book kind of ends with another ridiculously unbelievable turn of events for the kid. Reading the blurb of the second book, it seems to be promising that stuff will finally happen to Boone. So, I guess the first book is really just an overly drawn out introduction for the second book? I am curious to see if we finally get to a story, but I already wasted three bucks on this book. Not sure I can handle another entire book of a boy wandering aimlessly around a farm.

[Victoria Winifred · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book nearly impossible to put down once I started it. The expertly crafted first-person narrative pulled me immediately into the world of young Boone. I found his character to be very endearing. The way his thought processes worked due to his past was entirely realistic and so touching. And oh, what trials he has been through!
Having lived in and taught near the setting of this book in East Tennessee for several years (after teaching in NYC for ten years) I found the neighborhood and neighbor descriptions to be spot on. Many of my Tennessee students came from difficult family situations in a rural setting, so that made Boone's troubles touch my heart all the more. I know I have had some "Boones" in my classroom -- that is, when they came to school.
In the book, often the poison of Boone's past affects his own reactions to things and people, and I was moved when he recognized that destructive pattern in himself and tried to correct it. The other characters are also extremely well-developed, and I felt quite privileged to be among them.
Upon finishing, I immediately bought Book 2 and devoured it. I am currently on Book 3 and expect I will keep going. I'm so glad there's more!
I HIGHLY recommend this book and the series. Each installment is a fabulous read.
My sincere thanks to the author for sharing Boone with us!

[Arthur Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pushing Back is author Jim Hartsell’s book one in his five-book Boone series—and it is outstanding. I was put off a bit in reading the first several pages, because I don’t often find stories written in first-person active voice—“The air gets so thick here you can hardly draw breath sometimes” or “The path is one I made myself. I can see it, but that’s because I know where to look for the signs.” But the story is highly engaging, and it feels so intimate that I was irresistibly drawn deeper and deeper into the story, turn after turn. I finished the first 200 pages nonstop, before taking a break for dinner. I definitely recommend reading every book in Hartsell’s Boone series, in the proper sequence. Pushing Back contains plenty of well-thought-out action, and these actions are embedded in a totally authentic coming-of-age story, set in rural Appalachia. Boone is abandoned first by his mother and young sister, who move to Kentucky to escape the abusive father. And then the father commits suicide. So now there’s just Boone: just his tough and troubled 16-year-old self, deep in rural Appalachia, with a dead father to bury and come to terms with. This book is a great read. I look forward to books two, three, four, and five.

[Leoma Gilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pushing Back by Jim Hartsell is the first of the Boone series. Boone is a 16-year old boy who suddenly finds himself on his own with the freedom to skip school, drink moonshine and find a girlfriend. He also has the responsibility of taking care of himself, his home and his next-door neighbor in a rural part of east Tennessee. The story is told from Boone’s perspective, as he tries to figure out how to relate to people and situations that could be a threat to him. As with most young men at that age, there are many skills that need further development.

I’ve really enjoyed this book and look forward to the next two in the series. We are all insecure at some level and uncertain of how we will be received by others. The dialogue that Boone has with himself reflects this beautifully and results in a story that most if not all of us can relate to.

[Mary Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

We can all take lessons from Boone, the teenager forced into independence after unspeakable events occurred during a tragic weekend in his family’s mountain home in rural Tennessee. His journey to self-responsibility and basic survival came at many costs, but his rewards were also many. Boone begins his passage into adulthood through painful self-discovery and loneliness, both of which came at a pace that was much too fast for even the most savvy seventeen year old. Not only did he learn to trust others (including his reclusive elderly neighbor), he also began to realize that not everyone was like his abusive father. I cannot wait to read the second book in this series to find out how Boone continues to evolve.

[Wayne Zurl · Rating 5 out of 5]

PUSHING BACK by Jim Hartsell…..

It’s easy to write a first person story when your protagonist is your age and has close to your life experience. Middle-aged Jim Hartsell was able to place himself within the head of a seriously troubled teenager and articulate all the boy’s fears, hates and other emotions in a way that made me think the character (Boone) was writing his memoir. You can read the summary to get the gist of the story. What you can’t read on the dust jacket is the brilliance of this author who goes beyond just storytelling and captures the depth of what Life has inflicted on this seventeen-year-old. Top shelf writing. 5 stars.

[Cyn Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing in Pushing Back was so true to the Appalachian way of life in the hills of Tennessee I have to admit I was a bit uncomfortable reading it. Reminded me too much of how my life went in my teens. That is also what made it such a good read. The author does a fabulous job of drawing you in with first person narrative. Not my favorite viewpoint but well done in this book. At times I wondered if the author might possibly be recounting a bit of his own youth. Even though this is a coming of age series, I would not recommend it to anyone under age eighteen. Too graphic at times, which also helped make it a great read. Planning to read book two ASAP.

[Linda Fitzpatrick]

I loved reading Jim Hartsell’s book Pushing Back, the first in his Boone series. Early chapters introduce young Boone in a narrative thick with menace and impossible to put down. I felt compassion for Boone and worried about his troubled environment, a tribute to Hartsell’s skillful writing. He makes me believe that Boone is someone I could know, and love, and try to help. As someone newly relocated to the South I especially appreciated the sense of being immersed in a culture both exotic and rich. The story line was compelling, making me ready for more in the series. A deeply satisfying reading experience.

[Bill Barbour · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is an excellent writer who tells a story that happened recently. After I read a few dozen pages I had to remind myself that the year was 2013, not the 1930s. People still live sparsely, moonshine is still distilled, and parents still dessert their kids. Having a good neighbor may be the difference between life and death. Although sad in many ways, you will like the boy, Boone, and his commonsense logic as he survives in a not so modern world.

[Bj Dignam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent story- especially if you live in the south anywhere near Appalachia. I wanted the story to continue- I will probably read the whole series. Very engaging- the reader cares for the characters who are well developed.