Calvin Hennick's big-hearted but toughminded debut charts a course across 1,300 miles of American fault lines. His memoir recounts in vivid detail and urgent, conversational prose a 2016 road trip with his five-year-old son, from Worcester, Mass., to see family and a rodeo in small-town Iowa, where the author spent much of his unhappy childhood.
Hennick is a white man married to black woman; their son, Nile, is, in the boy's own words, "tannish" and, at the trip's start, still blissfully unaware of the ugly facts of American racism. Hennick conceived of the journey as a chance to explore with Nile questions of race and manhood, and one showstopping early passage finds the father fighting for the words to explain the legacy of Jackie Robinson--and the son asking, for the first time, "Am I white? Or am I black?"
Much of the book's considerable power comes from the contrast between Hennick's unsparing frankness as a writer and the tender circumspection of his parenting. Page after page, mile after mile, Hennick depicts himself trying to say the right thing at the right moment, trying to tell his son hard truths while still providing him the kind of safe, loving childhood Hennick himself never had. Scenes between them prickle with candid, everyday feelings too rarely dramatized in stories of child-rearing. Inevitably, as father and son motor toward corn country, Once More to the Rodeo plunges increasingly into the author's past, blooming into a treatise on family, fatherhood and the limits of forgiveness. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor