Amaranthine Chevrolet
Dennis E. Bolen’s insightful, beautiful coming-of-age novel Amaranthine Chevrolet is a hero’s journey filled with danger and yearning.
In 1967 on a Saskatchewan farm, fifteen-year-old Robin responds to the death of his caretaker-slash-employer by taking off in his boss’s field truck on a thousand-mile trek across Western Canada. Too young to legally drive, Robin ducks the police and takes lesser-used farm roads, making his way toward his mother’s home on the coast. Along the way, he has a run-in with a drunk, shares a meal with American draft-dodgers, and falls in love. As his antique truck struggles, he receives aid from a farmer and a counselor, among others, in replacing the Chevy’s parts.
Robin’s hope and trust throb behind the pages, and they are mirrored in the poetic prose. The distant mountains are a “great granite curtain,” and Robin’s ride through the flatlands is referred to as “seemingly eternal prairie sameness.” When Robin meets John, who helps him repair a busted oil pan, John speaks about art, wishing Robin would “feel the psychic vibrations the artist meant for you over the span of time and the chasm of mortality.” Similar impartations are passed to Robin by others he meets along the road home. While the stakes may not feel high for much of his travels, Robin’s will to discover more combines with the emerging landscape and the kindness of strangers to propel the story toward the promise of better tomorrows.
Reflecting life in rural Canada in the 1960s, the wonderful historical novel Amaranthine Chevrolet shows strangers lending a helping hand to a boy on the road, who meets a world driven on by no small amount of hope.
Reviewed by
Nick Gardner
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