Book Review for 7.21.24: The Road to Home

Title: The Road to Home 

Author: R.A. Douthitt

Date: 2021

ISBN: 979854661578

Nobody preaches in this book. Nobody gets converted. People have faith in God or they don't; they're not doctrinaire enough to mention "Jesus" or "Allah" or "Ha Shem," so a maximum number of readers can read without cognitive dissonance. It's because the author identifies as a Christian that I can identify this as a Christian book for readers who may be too young to have thought much about the Cosmic Mystery.

Molly is a young teenager. In chapter one, we see her sneaking out to the mall with a school friend who's not exactly a good influence, telling her mother she missed the bus. In subsequent chapters, we learn that Molly's mother liked shopping with Molly until Molly raged that she didn't want to go to the mall with her mother any more, and that Molly's mother came out to meet Molly at the bus stop and was killed by a drunk driver. Molly's father remarries and moves to the country right away, while Molly rages that psychologists recommend not making other major life changes during the year after bereavement.

But Molly's lucky. All the other major life changes are good. The rural community in New York State is delightful in the summer, though the small town school may not be so pleasant. Molly meets nice older people, then a nice boy and then a nice girl to hang out with. In fact they seem much nicer than her best friend from her city school, though Molly is loyal, and when she stands up to her old friend Amber about making fun of people on social media and taking parents for granted, Amber respects Molly's bereavement enough to stop talking that way. Soon Amber admits that the nicer tone of their conversation "feels like the old us." 

And their new house comes with a dog. The dog was abandoned by his previous human family has become a neighborhood dog. Everyone feeds him; people even pay for his rabies shots. Molly tries to adopt the dog, but he keeps looking for his original humans.

This novel is well neough written that it ought to be snapped up by a traditional publisher. Christian-phobia, anti-White discrimination, and the glut of new books people decided to finish and self-publish during the COVID panic, worked against it in 2021. Traditional publishers should be looking for reprint rights. This is an extraordinary dog story. It's not at all like Sounder but, when I think of ways to describe the unusual ending, Sounder is the only other dog story that comes to mind.