guest blogger Karen Weyant
Review of Lady Chevy: A Novel
By John Woods
New York: Pegasus Books, 2020
Lady Chevy is a very angry book. The characters are angry. The narrator is angry. Even the landscape is angry.
Set in the small town of Barnesville, Ohio, Lady Chevy takes the reader into the life of high school senior Amy Wirkner who is cruelly nicknamed “Chevy” because of her “wide backside.” Amy dismisses those who gave her this name with sarcasm that rings through the pages: “The name stuck in middle school. Rural boys are very clever and very sweet.”
From the start of the book, Amy is a sympathetic and likeable character. She lives in a world that has reminders of a productive and important past but is now dark and polluted by the fracking industry: “The earth trembles beneath us, hydraulic blasting, deep groans in the subterranean dark. Chemicals strip away shale, seep into the aquifers, contaminate the soil and extract natural gas to feed our nation. Our water is clouded brown, has a sulfurous stink. Sometimes, we can set it on fire.”
Her family life is not much better. Her baby brother was born deformed and has constant seizures. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother constantly flaunts her affairs. Like many characters found in novels that portray rural poverty life, Amy just wants to leave. She believes that college is her way out of her life. But only her neo-Nazi survivalist uncle is interested in helping her.
Lady Chevy, however, is more than just another coming of age in the Rust Belt world novel. It’s a thriller. One night, Amy’s best friend, Paul, arrives at her doorstep drunk and angry and hellbent on destroying a chemical tank owned by Demont, the energy company that is ravaging their world. He plans on using homemade bombs to carry out his plan, and he wants Amy to be the getaway driver.
The plan fails with catastrophic and heartbreaking results.
Lady Chevy is a novel that entices us with both a thrilling plot and engaging prose. The ending may not be what we expected, but deep down inside, for most of us, it’s what we wanted.
