Look What I Read!: Four Years From Home by Larry Enright

Note: I am currently putting together another Adrian McAllister short story to share with you here, but in the meantime, I wanted to put up a review of a book I read not too long ago by an author whose work I have come to enjoy very much.  His name is Larry Enright.  He tweets (@LarryEnright), he Facebooks (http://www.facebook.com/LarryEnrightAuthor), and he blogs (http://fouryearsfromhome.blogspot.com/).  Sometimes, he does all three at once.  He is very talented and entertaining.  What follows is my review of his book Four Years From Home which was originally published on the Goodreads website last year.  He is also the author of A King in a Court of Fools and Buffalo Nickel Christmas.  All three of his books are available at a major online retailer named for a long and muddy tract of water in a mosquito-ridden, tropical land.

Having finished Four Years from Home, I can honestly say I am very glad I read it, though it was a challenge to get through in places for one reason: the narrator.   He is just not a likable guy through most of the book, and his emotional grumblings and rambling fantasy sequences can get annoying. It's a lot like being on an airplane, headed to some fabulous destination, but forced to sit beside an obnoxious jerk for the whole flight. That said, there is more to him than first meets the eye.  The final destination at which the reader arrives makes a little discomfort along the way all worthwhile.

There are myriad ways I could potentially spoil the plot in this review, so I will simply say that Four Years from Home is the story of an oldest brother in an Irish-Catholic family from Pennsylvania trying to find out what happened to his youngest brother, a college student who is missing and presumed dead. This is no typical missing-person mystery however. No, siree!

If you are considering reading Four Years from Home, I'd highly recommend it. If you are already reading it and are wondering whether to stick with it, I say wholeheartedly "yes". I turned to reader reviews myself for reasons to keep with it, and I am glad that I did.

Four Years from Home is definitely an interesting, original work, and you will be glad to have read it when you are done.