Pedro Hoffmeister
Graphic The Valley
Graphic
The Valley
a novel
Tenaya has never left Yosemite Valley. He was born in a car by the Merced River, and grew up in a hidden camp with his parents, surviving on fish, acorns, and unfinished food thrown away by the park's millions of tourists. But despite its splendor, Tenaya's Yosemite is a visceral place of opposites, at once beautiful, dangerous, and violent. When he meets Lucy, a young woman from the south side of the park, Tenaya must choose between this new relationship and the Valley, terrorism and legend, the sacred versus the material.
In this modern retelling of Samson and Delilah, Graphic the Valley explores mythical strength, worldly greed, love, lust, and epic destruction. Set entirely in the majestic Yosemite Valley, Hoffmeister recalls Edward Abbey's vivid sense of place and urgent call for preservation of one of the world's most spectacular sites.
Reviews
Good + Bad
“The author of the acclaimed memoir The End of Boys and award-winning fiction collection Loss, has written an excellent coming-of-age debut novel. He skillfully interweaves the story of modern-day life in Yosemite with the the area’s turbulent and tragic history in the 1850s when Native Americans lost control of the land…the book’s sense of place is strong, capturing Yosemite’s wild beauty. Both adult and mature young adult readers and lovers of literary ecofiction will enjoy this fast-paced love story.”
— Library Journal
“With refreshingly fundamental first person narration and unusual character development, stripped in knowledge and language of anything but the necessary, each page of this novel illuminates its reader’s imagination with both tenacity and innocence.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Peter Hoffmeister is as ambitious as he is original. Graphic the Valley is many things at once: an ode to a place, a romance, a family drama, and a cautionary tale. From page one, it will surprise you. By the end, it will leave you surprisingly moved.”
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— Miriam Gershow, author of The Local News
“The narrator’s Yosemite is a sacred place…captured in Hoffmeister’s lean, immaculate, and devastating prose.”