American Rust

This story started off exciting but it went south fast. Too much writing about the minute details of the characters. I stopped reading it because there became too much discussion about abuse and molestation.

Sometimes why an author writes a book is just as important as what the book is about. American Rust is a story about two young men, Poe and Issac who are coming of age in a blue collar Pennsylvania steel town. Times are hard, the steel mills have shut down, the older residents are giving up and giving in to just surviving. The younger residents of Buell either accept their fate or leave without looking back. This book... Read Full Review

Meyer's American Rust is an amazing debut novel: an always engaging story of the radiating consequences of a crime told in shifting semi-stream-of-consciousness perspectives that give us brilliantly realized characters all yearning for some kind of escape and all the more heartbreaking for their inability to do so. Aptly set in a former booming steel region of Pennsylvania, it seems a kind of post coming-of-age story -- the... Read Full Review

I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of American Rust, a powerful debut novel and a rare find: compelling literary fiction with the engine of a gripping thriller. The story of the fallout of a murder on a group of connected characters is set in an economically depressed region of Pennsylvania whose struggle, like so many of these people, is all the more difficult in the (often literal) shadow of its former greatness... Read Full Review

I was privileged to receive an advance readers copy of American Rust. As the characters developed I found myself intrigued by the choices we make in life that take us where we go. The writing is dramatic, the plot intense and the story compelling. I can't believe this is Philipp Meyer's first novel. I know it sounds corny, but reading American Rust I was struck with the thought that if you had a little Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway... Read Full Review