Douglas Thayer

In the days before sunscreen, soccer practice, MTV, and Amber Alerts, boys roamed freely in the American West--fishing, hunting, hiking, pausing to skinny-dip in river or pond. Douglas Thayer was such a boy. In this poignant, often humorous memoir, he depicts his Utah Valley boyhood during the Great Depression and World War II. Known in some circles as a Mormon Hemingway, Thayer has created a richly detailed work that shares cultural DNA with Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. His narrative at once prosaic and poetic, Thayer captures nostalgia for a simpler time, along with boyhood's universal yearnings, pleasures, and mysteries.

Weeks away from turning sixteen, Kyle Hooper longs to get his license and (legally) drive the old Suburban his Grandpa Hooper left him. Sardonic, light-hearted, a prankster, Kyle wants more freedom in his Colorado Mormon life, including the freedom to date any number of lovelies, as he calls them. His mother, Lucille, a part-time trauma nurse and a devoted Mormon mom, wants Kyle to get serious about school and preparing for his mission. In vivid detail she often warns him about the consequences of a misspent youth-drug addiction, arrest and imprisonment, expulsion from school, early marriage to a pregnant girlfriend, poverty, STD, alcoholism, highway death. Filled with missionary zeal, Lucille works to bring Mark, Kyle's best friend, to the waters of baptism. Disobeying his mother one Saturday morning, Kyle, driving unlicensed, heads for the ski slopes. In Silver Canyon an avalanche sweeps his Suburban off the road. Trapped but getting air, grateful for the two roll bars Grandfather Hooper installed, Kyle knows he has to dig an escape shaft or die. Exhausted, starving, freezing, he begins to understand what his mother has been trying to teach him about the need for faith.