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from The Current, June 2010, Vol. 7 No. 6

The Good Life - Book Review

OKIE AUTHOR STRIVES TO 'STAY WHOLESOME'
by Jeff Jeffries

Ponca City native, Brett Horton, recently teamed-up with Lulu.com to release his debut quasi-fiction novel, Stay Wholesome. The book, which took Horton roughly five years to complete, deals with a young man's experiences and struggles with growing up in small-town America, only to discover that there's a world of opportunity that awaits. It's when these opportunities knock that we really begin to see how the character responds and reacts to the situations, and the continual notion to do what's right, what feels good; what, at the end of the day, feels wholesome.... More > The main character in the book goes through adolescence in an abstract, but not absurd way, dealing with scheming friends, teenage angst and heartbreak, all the while taking every bit of knowledge from these experiences to formulate some kind of reason for their happening and his being. The characters in this book indeed do their share of hell-raising, but those that strive to Stay Wholesome definitely find success, even after countless attempts at failed art and employment. Some of the situations the characters find themselves in led this reviewer to believe this was the work of a budding fiction writer, or at the very least one couldn't imagine to be testimony.

"I wanted to leave it up to the reader's imagination as to whether it was all real or partly fictional," Horton said, leaving me curious and (surely to the author's delight) wanting to pick up the book again to relive the coming of age story of a boy and his friends growing up in Ponca City and the surrounding areas. Horton is no Vonnegut Jr., no Hemingway, no Burroughs, no Ginsberg. Horton is Horton; determined and driven by a common and collective freedom, peace, purity and sustained good times. The book is also drastically different in that it wasn't edited with a fine-toothed comb like the major works were by the aforementioned authors either, so be a sport and overlook some of the punctuation and grammatical errors. This is a book you can relate to in some way, shape or form, unless you live in a squeaky-clean bubble, your farts smell like fresh spring flowers and you urinate glitter.

Get your copy of Stay Wholesome and other works by Brett Horton at Hastings in Stillwater and Norman, online at www.lulu.com and www.amazon.com, or at your favorite indie bookstores and Ponca City garage sales. < Less