"But what if it ain't who you end up, but who you were or could've been?" That's the question Champ, a painfully hopeful undergraduate, asks himself on a typical night of dealing drugs in Portland. Champ narrates one half of The Residue Years, the debut novel from Oregon native Mitchell Jackson. The other half is devoted to Champ's mother, Grace, who has just been released from prison and is fighting hard to avoid a relapse of her drug addiction.
Their community is a seemingly inescapable web of addiction and crime: "One up, one down," as a man recites in the courtroom during his arrest. Despite her past, Grace has the infallible dignity of a mother who cherishes her sons above all else. Champ, her eldest, vies for responsibility by visiting his younger brothers at school and diverting all of his earnings to his mother. When he realizes he might have the funds to reclaim his childhood home, he becomes fixated on this dream. All of their hope lies in the hands of a strangely generous real estate agent and the prospect that Champ will continue to avoid arrest--a premise that makes Jackson's story relentlessly tense. Still, the real core of The Residue Years isn't the plot, but the depth of the iron-strong bond between mother and son. --Annie Atherton