TC Boyle is a local favorite author who is regularly feted in the daily newspaper here in Santa Barbara. I had never read his work up to Wild Child, a collection of 14 short stories published in 2010.
I didn’t know what to expect so when the first story was set in Santa Barbara, I wondered if he set all stories here. The next one was set during the La Conchita landslides of 2005 so then I wondered if the stories were loosely based on the area. The next story was in Moorpark, and then the stories moved further south and across the country, each a different geographic location. The stories wandered back to Santa Barbara and began to move through backwards in time. The final and title story Wild Child is set in Napoleonic France.
Many of the characters are unlikable. I almost didn’t finish one where the main character told his boss that his daughter had died so he could get out of work for a few days.
I had the audiobook version of this and the author did the reading. This was good so I heard what the author intended certain ideas to sound like. There were notable passages where if I had been reading vs listening, I would have read it much differently.
Entertaining and digestible, enough that I will explore other TC Boyle books.
