Portable Wonderland

PREMISE: After three years’ hard time, minding no-one’s business but his own, Ray Klein wins his parole and chances his hand at a romance with prison psychiatrist Juliette Devlin. That same day, tribal war erupts and the prison – and its infirmary – falls into the hands of its inmates. Klein must choose either to claim his freedom and leave the ones he cares for to die, or risk everything and fight.

I’m not entirely sure when I read this so I’m going to assume it was the year it came out, 1994. Man, 1994…the year of the first Playstation and the year Kurt Cobain died. The first U.K. National Lottery was this year too, and having wasted more money only last night on trying to bag the £200m Euromillions, my lottery luck hasn’t changed at all since 1994. I swear it’s rigged.

On the book front, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom was published along with – more significantly, for me anyway – Volume 1 of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. An utter classic. Other books published that year: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor and Denis Lehane’s A Drink Before The War, which I actually read last year and loved. If you ask Goodreads to show you the top 200 books of 1994, Green River Rising isn’t on the list. And this is a list that has (albeit scraping in at number 196) a book entitled “When God Writes Your Love Story: The Ultimate Approach to Guy/Girl Relationships”. A book that I ought never read for fear of breaking my promise to keep this blog negative-free.

My point (if I even have one) is that Green River Rising, for me, was one of the best things of 1994 and although I haven’t read it since (I’m hoping to very soon) I’d imagine it will still be one of the best things of any year. A great book.