Pilgrims Upon the Earth By Brad Land

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Terry Webber is fifteen, disenchanted and, more often than not, high. His father, Benjamin, pays him little mind due in part to the fact that he has not been able to cope with his wife's suicide. The two men live together as strangers within their own household. Their interactions are curt and uninspiring. Terry, meanwhile, floats numbly about the day-to-day ennui of his life, comfortable, accepting of his absurd emotional nadir.

Alice Washington is the breath of fresh air (and second-hand smoke) needed to ignite whatever semblance of fervor for life Terry has left inside. The young pair scheme their classic escape off into the western sunset together. Their plan; To live with Alice 's sister in a remote commune somewhere in Colorado , a remote Neverland that, to them, symbolizes freedom from the dregs and nuisances of their high school existence. But after Alice is killed in a freak car accident during the trip, Terry funds himself for the first time, in the literal sense, alone.

This is the premise of Pilgrims Upon the Earth , the debut novel of best-selling memoirist Brad Land ( Goa t ). Myself a sucker for a good bildungsroman (I often pick up books whose reviews or synopses even remotely alludes to Holden Caulfield) I was eager to pick up Pilgrims.

Perhaps it's because I've surpassed my own real life coming-of-age experience, thus lacking the open-mindedness of reliving the poignant epiphanies Land was attempting to convey, but Pilgrims , on the whole, didn't leave me with much. It lacked the adorable, if not abrasive, protagonist that we all fell in love with in Salinger's magnum opus. There was no sweet little Phoebe character! Terry, instead, has an unnatural obsession with birds (he keeps a dead one in his school book bag for a bit too long). Terry's descent into loneliness and self-perpetuated exile from life is a bit melodramatic. I mean, Terry did lose his mother and, for all intensive purposes, his father as well, but his situation did not garner the kind of empathetic response I expected, or wanted, to have for him. He didn't give me a reason to want to see him find the light, so-to-speak. He could have wallowed in misery for the rest of eternity and I feel I would have still left the novel in the same manner.

At Drew University , students and faculty are given e-mail addresses that are a combination of the user's first initial and last name. Brad Land's e-mail would be, Bland. Yep, that pretty much sums it up.