Shohola Falls: A Novel

With the death of his mother and the sudden disappearance of his father, teenager Tommy Blanks is left to live alone in the Bronx on the money his father left him and what he can steal. His shoplifting eventually lands him in Upstate New York in a Catholic Boys’ Home run by a demonic priest. There Tommy falls in love with a local girl, Nada, but also meets his nemesis, Adam Delano. After a school-wide brawl, Tommy escapes and is presumed dead by the local authorities when they find his hat floating in the river. Tommy is taken in by a local hermit, a Korean war veteran, who leads him to Tommy’s great-great grandfather’s deserted house in a nearby town. History and fiction converge with the discovery that Thomas Blankenship, Tommy’s great-great grandfather, is the young man whom Mark Twain used as the prototype for Huckleberry Finn. And Tommy’s life on the road as an orphan parallels Twain’s resourceful Huck Finn. Eventually, his search for the facts and the meaning of his own experience leads Tommy to Chicago, the Southwest, San Francisco, and finally back home to Shohola Falls. Pearson’s evocative prose works to dramatic effect in a novel that is part mystery, part bildungsroman, part love story. The book will appeal to a general audience and especially aficionados of Twain.