Description: An historical fiction, or a fictional history -- you decide which -- intended to be read aloud, Surprise, Texas is a story about how we sometimes must become what we pretend to be.
Review Quotes:
Andy Wilkinson has written an honest to god West Texas Panhandle Classic. Surprise, Texas is a big wondrous novel full of sprawling generational tales of complex human desire and circumstance gone amuck, kind of amuck, not so amuck and out of the muck. It's a true versatility.
Thom Ed, the bean spilling narrator, spills out words in such giant booming voice you might confuse everything he says with pure crooked fiction...unless, of course, you just happen to have been spawned from and raised among such an eccentric clutch of wild savage souls yourself and know for sure that this is also the absolute hand-on-the-bible truth...even at its' most extravagant points of black-tongued exaggeration.
The language is old style rich, pitch-perfect and hilarious. Moving full throttle across the tongue and rolling sweet into the ear in that unique way that makes reading it out loud an essential gift to yourself...and anyone else listening! If Mark Twain was still around, I'm sure he'd find great kinship with the fine tuned language and bountiful stories that inhabit this novel. He'd also laugh his ass off.
Reading Surprise, Texas is a great adventure and the very best kind of surprise.
Terry Allen