Whiskey Rebel

This is a book that feels real, reflecting the lives and experiences of far too many. Told in a voice that pulls me back to my first read of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Dunn crafts a narrative that mirrors our world today—where Heller’s work captured the absurdity of World War II’s battlefront overseas, Dunn turns his lens toward modern life. Both authors shine a light on the quirky individuals who populate our world, exploring how their experiences shape them. Both demand the reader examine what drives these people—making us laugh, then pause, then ponder, and finally challenging us to reconsider what we think we know.

What I love about Dunn’s style is how he layers an allegorical quality into his satire, drawing inspiration from Geoffrey Chaucer’s storytelling tradition and the biting wit of Jonathan Swift—but with a distinctly American twist. With character names like Punxie Tawney, Hamilton Chance, and Sam the Man—you can't miss the humor and connection Dunn is drawing. He uses history as a launching point—not just to explore national identity and the American thirst for personal freedom, but to demonstrate that storytelling has long been a vehicle for capturing the desires and needs of a people within a single moment.

This book will grip you from page one to The End. Dunn’s ability to craft a story within a story—his characters acting as storytellers themselves—makes this novel feel both timeless and mythic. It reaches deep into the past while illuminating our pinpoint present, showing that this is about so much more than one man in the mountains making whiskey. It explores the inner need we all have to define ourselves in the face of everything thrust upon us.

To the end, Dunn crafts a narrative that not only reflects a moment in time but forces the reader to confront the very questions that shaped America as a young republic—the tension between personal liberties and government authority, the lasting consequences of rebellion, and even, in retrospect, the Founding Fathers themselves—not as untouchable icons, but as flawed men grappling with the weight of nation-building.

Funny enough, I first picked up this book because of a misread of the title—I thought I was about to dive into a work of historical fiction chronicling the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. What I found instead was something far more expansive: a novel that interrogates our personal and collective struggles with identity, freedom, and the stories we choose to listen to as well as those we tell ourselves