Another Kind of Eden

I received a free electronic copy of this book, an ARC, from Netgalley, James Lee Burke, and the publisher Simon & Schuster. I have read Another Kind of Eden of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I love everything James Lee Burke blesses us with. And though I can't wait to read his southern novels, His Holland Family sagas are all exceptional. This book is more true-to-life than anything else I have read about this period of time in the Southwest. It is obviously based on personal experience, and from the heart. Taking place in the early 1960s, we are in southern Colorado, a small town called Trinidad 21 miles north of Raton, New Mexico. Trinidad was a mining town back in the early 20th century, and with a population now of about 8,000 and still dwindling in 2021, it continues to be economically dependent on tourism and truck gardens, still small, down-home, insular, and isolated. This is pretty much a template of small western towns, then and now. This is a first-person tale told by Aaron Holland Broussard, a young man of 26, trained as an English teacher but working his way across the west by hopping trains and making a living as a farmworker while he waits for a publisher to want his first novel. The western lifestyle of the early 1960s is portrayed as it probably was. I was 12 or 13 in southern New Mexico and didn't see much off of the farm but from what I remember the times were rather bleak. Money was tight - is always tight in farm country - and immigrants and hippies were often traveling through on their way to anywhere else. Veterans of WWII and Korea were also traveling through our west, looking for something. They would find a place to land, but the road would call them before long, and they would be on their way to somewhere else. Aaron lets us see it through his eyes, and it is so sad it might bring you to tears, but you will have a much better understanding of both that time frame in America and the woes of veterans of our country's 20th-century wars. Another Kind of Eden is a book I would like everyone I know to read. It is a wake-up call for all of us to take to heart.