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Please welcome Robert Greer, author of Spoon, as he discusses his vision for the novel.

My novel Spoon is as much a coming-of-age novel about a nineteen-year-old rancher’s son, TJ Darley, as it is about a mysterious loner’s clairvoyance and the changing landscape of the ranching community in the modern West. In the novel, loner Arcus Witherspoon, aka Spoon, befriends a Montana ranching family down on their luck. He helps the Darleys struggle against an attempt by a coal company to take over their land and along the way also guides their son toward manhood. Although the novel is best defined as a literary piece, I set Spoon in motion with an element of suspense. Perhaps, I suspect, because my skills as a writer hover around that sensibility. In a sense, I hoped to combine two things I have been trying to master for years into a single form: a novel of suspense and a literary novel. In Spoon, I paint a picture of a loner. A half-Indian, half-black cowboy adrift in the West, searching for his family roots. Spoon is a man who, it turns out, has the tenacity and wisdom to help others during his journey. The novel is not a Western in the genre sense of the word, but it is certainly a novel of the West and, as such, I have tried to make the story take in the broad western panorama that I suspect many people have in their minds when they think of the West. I imagine that there is a little bit of Arcus Witherspoon in me since I own a working cattle ranch in Wyoming and I admit up front that there is also some plot-related bias toward a rancher’s perspective in the book. In the end, however, as with all novels, the book is about people and characters, and they are ultimately the ones who navigate readers down any storytelling road.

Thank you, Robert, for taking the time to stop by.  For more information about Greer and his other pieces of fiction, please visit his Web site.

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• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing (October 1, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1555916899
• Source: Publisher

Young TJ Darley was driving down a Montana highway when he sees a hitchhiker.  The man, half Indian and half Black, wore an expensive hat but no boots.  TJ slows down and picks him up. The man introduces himself as Arcus Witherspoon, or Spoon for short. He’s on a mission to discover his family roots.

When TJ and Spoon arrive at the Darley family farm, TJ convinces his father to give Spoon a job.  The Darley’s have been struggling to keep the farm running and and desperately need the extra help.

Spoon soon reveals  he is clairvoyant. Despite the obsurdity of the claim, for some reason TJ believes him.  Spoon predicts trouble for the Darley’s farm.  A drought is on the way.  Meanwhile,  family continues to get pressured by Acosta Energy, a coal company who wants to destroy the land by mining. Spoon and the Darley family family stand their ground, a decision that soon becomes life endangering.

Spoon continues his struggle to find his roots.  At the same time, TJ is desperately attempting to find himself as well.  His parents have planned for him to attend college and leave the farm, but is this really what he wants?  Spoon ultimately turns out to be a story of growth and discovery for both of these characters.

Greer has created a very compelling character driven novel of the American West  that intoxicates the reader with it’s very detailed and descriptive text. I’m typically not a fan of this type of fiction, but something about Spoon’s character pulled me in. Spoon was a very dynamic character with several layers of complexity. I wanted to learn more about this man, and Greer slowly reveals that throughout the novel.  That is my only complaint, I wish the pace was a bit faster.   In the end, I recommend this book to any fan of character driven novels or those about modern day American West.

About the Author:

Robert Greer is author of the popular CJ Floyd mystery series: The Devil’s Hatband, The Devil’s Red Nickel, The Devil’s Backbone, Resurrecting Langston Blue, The Fourth Perspective, The Mongoose Deception, and
Blackbird, Farewell, as well as two medical thrillers and a short-story collection entitled Isolation and Other Stories. He is a practicing pathologist and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, and he owns a cattle ranch in Wyoming. Please visit his author website, www.robertgreerbooks.com.

On to the giveaway!  I have five copies of Spoon available!  To enter, answer the following question: Who is your favorite book character?

For extra entries, blog or tweet about it, but be sure to include a link to your post or tweet!  Contest will end next Friday, October 23rd.  US and Canadian residents, only.  No P.O. Boxes.

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