Roy Edward Jackson’s Reel Around the Fountain is a coming-of-age novel about JP, a gay boy growing up in a working-class Michigan town amid illness, alcoholism, Catholic guilt, and a family that expresses love through caretaking, teasing, sacrifice, and the occasional hustle. The novel begins with JP learning that his birth coincided with several family upheavals, including the accident after which his father, already living with multiple sclerosis, never walked again. From there, JP tries to assemble the truth from relatives whose stories are shaped by grief, guilt, exaggeration, and self-protection. His questions about the past run alongside his growing awareness of his sexuality and his understanding that, in his world, becoming an adult often means knowing what must remain hidden.

The book’s most striking choice is its second-person narration. Calling JP “you” gives the story the intimacy of someone revisiting a younger self, sometimes compassionately and sometimes with exasperation. It also suits a novel preoccupied with memory. Scenes don’t unfold as a clean historical record but as stories retold, revised, and connected through songs, objects, hospital rooms, bars, Catholic rituals, and family sayings. Records are especially important. Music gives JP and his father a shared language, while scratched vinyl, skipping songs, cassette tapes, and 45 adapters become ways of thinking about damaged memories and lives that keep circling back to the same moments.

Jackson handles painful material with an earthy, observant sense of humor. JP’s attention can land on a dirty carpet, a strange phrase, a record label, or the social rules of a funeral home even when something devastating is happening nearby. That voice keeps the novel grounded in the physical details of working life and poverty. It’s also where the book finds much of its emotional force. JP’s family members are vivid because their care is practical and imperfect. GG manipulates systems, Paw Paw gives up trucking to become a caregiver, Anna turns pain into blunt jokes, and JP learns to work, write obituaries, take photographs, and tell stories. Even after abuse leaves him tangled in shame, the narrative stays attentive to the difference between what was done to him and what he’s been taught to blame himself for.

The novel is episodic and deliberately repetitive, shaped more like an album of connected tracks than a tightly plotted drama. Its recurring phrases and memories occasionally slow the pace, but they also create the feeling of a mind worrying at old wounds until their meaning changes. By the end, JP’s writing, music, and move to Chicago offer him a future built from the people he’s lost rather than an escape from them. The record-adapter tattoo he receives becomes a fitting symbol of that inheritance, something small that connects the music to the person carrying it. I’d recommend Reel Around the Fountain most strongly to readers who appreciate queer coming-of-age fiction, complicated family portraits, working-class settings, and novels in which pop music carries as much emotional history as dialogue does.

Pages: 324 |  ISBN : 978-1590218013