Review: Dodgers

Dodgers by Bill Beverly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dodgers, by author Bill Beverly, is a YA novel, haunting and beautiful, less “Y” and more “A”, filled with an intoxicating combination of poetic prose and the gritty language of the streets.

The story follows East, a young LA gang member, as he leaves the dangerous streets of his city for the first time, sent on a mission to pull off a hit ordered by his uncle. East, his brother Ty, and two others (Walter and Michael) head off for Wisconsin, armed with the resources, if not the experience, that they will need to get the job done.

Seeing the journey through East’s eyes is like living again the wonders of a child. He marvels at the mountains, is ensnared by the allure of the Vegas strip and shivers naively in the first bone-chilling cold he has ever known. Author Beverley is a brilliant wordsmith, giving a voice to East that portrays him as both child-like and adult, stuck in that vast in-between space that calls in both directions:

East liked driving here—the flat, unruffled fields with no one in sight, blind stubble mown down into splinters, maybe a tractor, maybe an irrigation rig like a long line of silver stitches across the fabric of earth. The flatness. There was more in the flatness than he’d expected. The van’s shadow lay long, and the fields traded colors. The boys slept in intervals or complained. Riding in a car for more than a few hours, he thought, was like suspended animation—somewhere under the layers of frost, your heart beat. To the left, a thunderstorm hovered, prowling its own road.

Know going in that the YA genre label is a bit of misdirection, as the language alone would preclude this from being appropriate for younger teenagers. Racial epithets and adult language, as well as episodes of profound violence, are many and varied. They are, however, as important to the story as the characters themselves.

Brutal and heart breaking, poetic and raw, this read will stay with you long after the cover has been closed.


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