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(More customer reviews)Herlong
This tale is an all too real one of a boy growing up along with his three best friends in a small, isolated, high desert town which is an Army Ordnance Depot. It includes many of the trials and tribulations that boys encounter on their way to manhood. Although the people and events are fictional the author has made them true to life. Anyone who has lived and grown up in a small town, military or otherwise, may well recognize himself and/or other people he has known. The story is told from the view point of the main character, Jim Miller, who describes his impressions of Herlong and we get to know him and his friends as we would friends of our own. As many of us do while growing up, Jim has significant life changing experiences and many decisions to make along the way all of which will shape his future. This is a most absorbing novel.
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Jim Miller arrived at Herlong when he was twelve years old. Jim, his brother Davey, mother and new stepfather moved to the high desert town in northern California in the early summer of 1946. It was hot and dry and a place that Jim hated from the moment they arrived in their very old and tired 1934 Ford sedan. Unlike San Francisco, Dayton, Ohio, and other cities Jim had known, Herlong was a small town filled mostly with people who came from all over the United States to work there during and after World War Two. Herlong Elementary with its eight grades soon became the focus of Jim's early life. At his age girls were important competitors but three boys became his best friends. Steve Whiting, Billy Jewel, Howard Soars and Jim, nicknamed "Brain" for his yearly achievement test scores, hung around together through elementary school, high school and summer vacation work, forging tight emotional bonds that would later become a limiting force in Jim's life. Herlong had no high school so students were bused to Susanville to attend Lassen Union High. Jim excelled in his classes at Lassen while his friends accepted mediocre grades and could hardly wait to get out of school and enter the work force at Sierra Ordnance Depot, the reason for Herlong's existence.After a semester at the University of Santa Clara and a wild Christmas vacation Jim realized that he had to leave Herlong so that his life would mean more than a dead-end job in a dead-end town.
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