Jordan McClellan is the youngest child of Rachel and Eamon, two Oklahoma farmers at the turn of the 20th century. His siblings, Danny and Becky, are both respected athletes—Danny is a draft pick for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, and Becky’s the star of her high school basketball team. Jordan, however, is more academically inclined and is at odds with his emotionally distant and abusive father. “I was fifteen when my father hit me,” Logan writes early on, beginning a story that captures the tension of the fraught family dynamic in simple, clear prose. After graduating high school as valedictorian and heading to college on scholarship, Jordan inadvertently causes an accident that injures both his father and his brother, ending his brother’s baseball career. Despite a promising career teaching literature at Oklahoma City University, guilt and depression lead Jordan to the bottle, and after a fateful night at a speakeasy, he gets behind the wheel of a car and causes the death of a pedestrian. Logan’s novel follows Jordan after he’s sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter and tries to rebuild his life, all in the shadow of World War II, where his eldest brother has become a pilot. The driving force of the novel is whether the McClellan family—and particularly Jordan and Eamon—can heal after multiple tragedies, and if literature, and the life of the mind, can serve as a refuge in crises. In Jordan, Logan has crafted a compelling narrator and central character, whose faults feel realistic and whose emotional journey will keep readers engaged. The novel covers a vast span of time (from the late 1800s at the book’s opening, all the way through the 1950s), causing certain plot points to feel rushed, such as Jordan’s life in prison, which is effectively the core of the book. However, the narrative arc is nonetheless satisfying—occasionally moving, and even terrifying at times.
