Barstow Boy - A Love Story - by Pete O'Brien (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Danny Olmstead has lived all his young life with the fact that his klansman father murdered a black man's white wife in cold blood simply because she was riding in the same car with him. He was five-years-old at the time, living in Harrison, Arkansas, and he also witnessed his father's own death that same night. Soon thereafter, his widowed mother moved them to Barstow on US Route 66 in California's Mojave Desert. There, he was constantly exposed to the ideology of his white supremacist uncle, Willis, but throughout his childhood and early adolescence he somehow managed to resist embracing the racial hatreds that fuel everyone in his uncle's circle. All of that is tested when he is framed for the murder of Jamal Kendricks, a black teammate who beat him out as starting quarterback on the Barstow High School football team the summer before his senior year. Evidence is found that appears to be damning, his arrest is imminent, and it is then that Willis encourages him to run, his destination the Southern California white supremacist underground and the company of men and woman of "like mind" who have agreed to shelter him. Left behind is Jennifer Miller, a beautiful Jewish girl he's been infatuated with since grammar school. She is his only alibi, her father believes her to be in danger because of her association with him, and she is shipped her to New York to live with relatives.

The journey that our young protagonist embarks on becomes a saga of betrayal, treachery, and unrequited love, but also one of grim determination. Through a series of remarkable events, Danny is able to quite literally re-invent himself just a handful of miles from Barstow but an entire world away, in Los Angeles.

Barstow Boy is a tale of honor, friendship, and a refusal to hate that is particularly poignant and appropriate at a time when America struggles to find true north with its moral compass, and where blatant racism seems more manifest than it has been since the mid-1960s.