Joel Rosenberg: Home Front

Forge (Hardcover), ISBN: 0-765-30498-8

Ernest Hemingway, Doc Holliday, John Crazy Horse and George Washington all suffered from bearing the same names as famous Americans. The Army made the cruel jest worse by assigning all four to serve in the same tank in Vietnam.

Nowadays, middle-aged, crankily divorced freelance copy-editor Ernest “Call me Sparky” Hemingway lives in the small North Dakota town of Hardwood. Out of the blue he gets a phone call from Tenishia, the teenaged daughter of his war buddy “Prez” Washington. A Minneapolis gang killed her father, and he once firmly instructed her that, if anything like this happened, she was to contact one of the other three old comrades. Now the gang that killed Prez is after Tenishia too.

Despite himself, Sparky is dragged in. As a first measure he brings Tenishia home to Hardwood, but the gang that killed Prez won’t let her go so easily. All three surviving buddies reunite to face up to the Minneapolis gangbangers and solve her little difficulty.

The telling of this somewhat lightweight tale is appropriately light-hearted, but Rosenberg runs into difficulties with this style. The flipness too often grates. The jocularities and observations on life prove neither especially witty nor especially profound. One’s irritation with them grows as the same observations are repeatedly introduced as freshly coined — presumably a matter of oversight on the part of both author and editor. By midway through, as the annoyance factor rises, you might be tempted to put the book aside.

To do so would be a mistake. The book’s great strength lies in the characterization not of Sparky, its main protagonist, but of Tenishia. Rosenberg renders this stubborn and strong-willed yet vulnerable and terribly frightened black teenage girl, suddenly plunked into an all-white world, beautifully. All the other irritations with the book fade into insignificance beside the fact that we care so desperately about her fate, and hope so much that, despite all the odds, there’ll be a happy ending to the tale for her.

Some of the other characters are nicely done too — Jeffie, the local white boy smitten instantly by the newcomer to the Hardwood high school, and Bridget, Sparky’s old flame suddenly reappeared in his life — but it’s the brutally orphaned girl herself, even though she has comparatively little onstage time, who captures our emotion and keeps the pages turning.

So it’s well worth reading this book solely for the great pleasure of encountering Tenishia, who’s a substantial fictional creation. I suspect she’ll remain in my mind long after much of the rest of Home Front, including its rather humdrum plot, has been forgotten.

John Grant

John Grant/Paul Barnett is author of over 60 books, Consultant Editor to AAPPL and US Reviews Editor of Infinity Plus. His most recent novels are The Far-Enough Window, from BeWrite, and The Dragons of Manhattan, currently being serialized in Argosy. His collaboration with artist Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge, nominated for a 2003 Hugo Award, was followed in 2005 by The Stardragons. His most recent major nonfiction is The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective, with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville. His story collection Take No Prisoners was released by Willowgate Press in August 2004. He has won the Hugo (twice), World Fantasy Award, Locus Award, Chesley Award, Mythopoeic Society Award, J. Lloyd Eaton Award, and a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award. He is married to Pamela D. Scoville, Director of the Animation Art Guild; they live in New Jersey with four cats and not enough bookshelves.