Boonville

Book excerpt: Surrounded by rednecks, misfits, and counterculture burnouts, John Gibson ¬the reluctant heir of an alcoholic squirrel-sculpting grandmother ¬- and Sarah McKay - a commune-reared "hippie-by-association" - search for self and community in 1989 rural Mendocino County, California. The dying logging industry is colliding with the economic rise of wineries, tourism, and the unregulated marijuana trade in The Emerald Triangle. Boonville is the hilarious, darkly comic tale of how John and Sarah try to reconcile the facts of heredity, sexuality, personal expression, love, death, the possibility of an existence without God, their cultural wars, and what happens when they choose to make art from their lives.