Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He's also a complicated father figure to this novel's narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade's stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening. Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks' debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America's boomer counterculture.
"[N]uanced with fluid prose and a pensive, melancholy undercurrent . . ."
Publishers Weekly
"Boarded Windows is a contemporary orphan story singing the music and mood of America's counterculture."
Twin Cities Metro Magazine
"This novel calls into question the notion of truth and asks to whom one's story really belongs . . . it is rife with humans desperate for connection, for finding their place in this enigmatic world."
