Emmett Watson has just returned to Nebraska after eighteen months (cut short because of good behavior and his father’s death) at a juvenile detention farm to which he had been sent after a punch in the face led to the death of a taunting classmate of his at the fair. Looking forward to a new start for himself and his eight-year-old brother Billy, Emmett has made a plan to invest the limited cash his father left them in a house to refurbish and sell, making a profit and buying themselves a new life. However, not only has Billy been creating his own plan for their fresh start (based on his compendium of adventure stories, his love for heroic journeys, and his desire to reconnect with the mother who abandoned the family eight years earlier), but also two of Emmett’s fellow inmates from Salina—Duchess and Wooly—secretly hitched a ride out of the farm and intend to join Emmett and Billy’s road trip with an adventure of their own. This motley crew finds themselves traveling along the Lincoln Highway to New York, jumping trains, stealing cars, and climbing through barbed wire fences, meeting lots of other adventurers along the way. 

I loved Emmett and Billy, but Duchess made me absolutely crazy. I couldn’t quite get past his good intentions given the utterly ridiculous and harmful consequences of his actions. I cringed reading each of his chapters, even as I developed somewhat more sympathy for him throughout the novel. Wooly’s story was confusing and sad and heartbreaking, and I just wanted to give him and his sister Sarah a big hug. I also enjoyed meeting the side characters and would have loved to learn more about Townhouse and Ulysses, especially (and I hope he eventually found his family!). Overall, my primary criticism of the book, other than my distaste for Duchess, was the feeling that some of these storylines were left so unresolved, and I really cared about the characters. Most simply, I actually wanted to follow Emmett and Billy’s journey along the Lincoln Highway, and the story was almost exclusively about the detours. Amit Towles’ writing is absolutely beautiful, at both the sentence level and the story level, and I was truly engrossed throughout the story, even remarking on a few particular sentences and observations. The characterization had great depth, and the shifts in perspective were masterful. Each character truly had their own voice, and Towles created a fabulous mosaic of intertwined histories.