Praise for Off Season: Discovering America on Winter's Shore
"A deftly written and engaging memoir ... McAlpine has a gift for seeking out crusty local characters who seem wedded to the places they inhabit."
-Robert Finn, Bookreporter.com
In this story of love and hope, Pogue Whithouse, an ordinary, extraordinary man, sets out alone on a cross-country road trip in his eighty-fifth year. Hoping to come to grips with haunting memories and reconcile a past filled with life-altering love and loss, he drives his turquoise 1967 Mustang out of his home in California to an eventual destination of the East Coast.
A story of love and of humanity, Pogue's remarkable adventure across the country and through life reminds us that the human heart and spirit are forces as capricious as they are powerful. As Pogue looks back over his lifetime, he struggles with the memories that haunt him-his brother's death, the horrors of fighting on a Pacific island during World War II, and his wife's infidelity-in an effort to finally close those chapters.
Pogue's journey, though, is more than physical. Each mile consumed, each road traveled, leads to obstacles finally overcome and ghosts at last laid to rest. He makes an eventual truce with the past-a cathartic gesture, made all the more poignant through Pogue's deeply philosophical nature.
Skillfully wrought, Together We Jump is a coming-of-age novel of a different sort, one that shows the power of belief and the possibility of redemption within the twilight of life.
