Michael Gills

Go Love Michael Gills

Josephine Stepwell Harvell is certainly not lucky in love; from Buddy Washer, the Arizona mistake, who got her pregnant and then got arrested trying to smuggle weed in the belly of a Santa Claus suit, to O. W., a truck driving brawler who pawns everything including her sewing machine to cover bets, Josephine knows that love isn't easy. Go Love's muddy relationships finally twist together amidst the weirdness of a southern funeral in Lonoke, Arkansas, a place where housewives string cottonmouth water moccasins from tree limbs to tease out rain, or to make a man impotent for cheating. Anything at all's possible in such a place. Just as the African women shout out during the funeral, go love is the command the novel's inhabitants must finally live by, even when life offers up a truckload of reasons to do the contrary. Even if it kills us-go love.