Wild Hands Toward the Sky

Wild Hands Toward the Sky by Ray Elliott. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780964142374.

A boy grows up in the shadow of a war he never saw -- and a father he never knew. John Walter McElligott is growing up on a rural Illinois farm during World War II and the years afterward. His father died on Guadalcanal before he could really know him. So it falls to the veterans who did come home -- men bound to him by respect for the father he lost -- to teach him what it means to carry duty, responsibility and honor into manhood. Set against the vanishing landscape of small-town Midwestern America, WILD HANDS TOWARD THE SKY is a realistic coming-of-age novel in the tradition of American naturalist fiction -- a story of what a community owes a young boy who lost everything before he understood what hed lost. For readers of Midwestern literary fiction, WWII homefront stories and coming-of-age novels grounded in real, hard-won detail.