Drawing Straws, George Pogue’s debut novel, is a “coming of age book.” Set in rural Missouri in the early 1960s, a ten-year-old Newton Carriger grows into his teenage years. His story includes the usual boyhood pranks, pastimes, and typical traumas-until a mysterious stranger comes to town.
Newton is rescued from drowning by an African American drifter-a hobo, who befriends the boy, and then is found murdered. Newton’s ongoing search for resolution to that murder is, in large part, a key to his becoming a man.
The story is a serious social commentary about the insular lives of rural people who gloss over the murder of a transient black man because he was not “one of their own.” The local law enforcement community just plain ignored investigating why a hobo died violently, even when all the evidence pointed to homicide.
