Truly Like Lightning
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Average rating4.3
From the New York Times bestselling author David Duchovny, an epic adventure that asks how we make sense of right and wrong in a world of extremes. For the past twenty years, Bronson Powers, former star Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon, has been homesteading deep in the uninhabited desert outside Joshua Tree with his three wives and ten children. Bronson and his wives, Yalulah, Mary, and Jackie, have been raising their family away from the corruption and evils of the modern world. Their insular existence—controversial, difficult, but Edenic—is upended when an ambitious young property developer, Maya Abbadessa, stumbles upon their land. Hoping to make a profit, she crafts a wager with the family that sets in motion a cataclysmic chain of events. Maya, threatening to report the family to social services, convinces them to enroll three of the children in a nearby public school. Bronson and his wives agree that if Maya can prove that the kids do better in town than homeschooled in their desert oasis, they will sell her a piece of their priceless plot of land. Suddenly confronted with all the complications of the twenty-first century that they have tried to keep out, the Powerses must reckon with their way of life as they try to save it. Truly Like Lightning, David Duchovny’s fourth novel, is a heartbreaking meditation on family, religion, sex, greed, human nature, and the vanishing beauty of an ancient desert.
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Nothing Technically Wrong, Readers May Hate It Anyway. This is one of those books by a master storyteller that is at once too cerebral and too cliche. It is overall a good story, but there is so much to not like here. From the hard core leftist politics that get pretty damn preachy (including several anti-Trump diatribes blaming him for all the ills that have been present in this country since its Founding) to ... other events of a personal nature that get too close to spoilery territory to reveal. And yet there is nothing technically wrong here. The story is well edited, it flows well within its frame, it is reasonably researched (and then flung out to left field, X-Files style - though not to a scifi level), the characters are reasonable within the boundaries described in the book (though in real life many of their actions would leave an observer scratching their heads). Ultimately there is enough here to warrant reading the story - and enough here that no matter your politics, you're probably going to want to throw it down in disgust. And yet there is no objective “this is bad” thing to hang removal of so much as a single star on. And thus, this book is recommended.
Plot Details:
This complex story takes place in the Joshua Tree desert, far from any civilization. Bronson Powers, a current Mormon and former Hollywood stuntman, lives with his two wives and 10 children on the large amount of land that he happens to own. But what happens when someone stumbles across his life inadvertently and wants to make some money off of it? Bronson's life changes completely when he ends up agreeing to let 3 of his children head to a public school for the first time.
My Thoughts:
First of all, I love the originality of this story! There's a lot of depth to it, and a lot of characters. With such a cast of characters, it's not easy to expand on all of their stories and personalities, but I think this story hit the mark. We get to know not only Bronson, but several of his family members as well. Putting three kids in school that have been raised solely by their parents up to this point was bound to have some kind of explosive outcome, but who could tell what it would be? The story is told not just about the kids, but about their parents and others involved in the situation as well.
I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. There's a lot of setup in the first few chapters, but it's necessary, as Bronson has quite a story. Once you get to know and care about the characters, it's easy to get interested in how this will all play out in the end. This was certainly a very original idea, and honestly, I'd love to hear more about this family in a sequel. I hope we have that to look forward to!
