Michael Parker. If You Want Me to Stay. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005.

With his mother gone, having abandoned the family, and his father ravaged by mental illness, fourteen- year-old Joel Junior is forced into adulthood. When their father becomes violent, Joel takes his two younger brothers and leaves in search of some way to save the family. The novel takes place in the 1970s in and around Trent, the same fictional eastern North Carolina town in which two of Parker’s previous novels were set. Joel narrates the story in a vivid first person, his worries interspersed with the music of the day running through his head.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2005, Coastal Plain, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Parker, Michael

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