2017 Finalist for Literary Fiction, Foreword Reviews Best Fiction
Books of 2017 by Chicago Review of Books One of 19 Books You Should
Read This September by Chicago Review of Books The small plains
town of Ingleside, Nebraska, is populated by down-on-their-luck
ranchers and new money, ghosts and seers, drugs and greed, the
haves and the have-nots. Lives ripple through each other to
surprising effect, though the connections fluctuate between
divisive gulfs and the most intimate closeness. At the center of
this novel is the story of Teensy and his daughter, Luann, who face
the loss of their land even as they mourn the death of Luann's
mother. On the other end of the spectrum, some townspeople find
enormous wealth when developers begin buying up acreages. When
Glory Days—an amusement park—is erected, past and present collide,
the attachment to the land is fully severed, and the invading
culture ushers in even darker times. In Glory Days Melissa
Fraterrigo combines gritty realism with magical elements to paint
an arrestingly stark portrait of the painful transitions of
twenty-first-century, small-town America. She interweaves a slate
of gripping characters to reveal deeper truths about our times
and how the new landscape of one culture can be the ruin of
another.Read the author's discussion guide. Purchase the
audio edition.