Gun Love: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of March 2018:“My mother was a cup of sugar. You could borrow her anytime.” Filled with sayings that bolster the heart and then kick it, Gun Love is a story about a single mother and her daughter, the car that they live in, and a trailer park in Florida that fills with guns through gun trafficking—“In no time the weapons became stacks of metal rising in layers on both beds.” It skates between funny and fierce, heartbreaking and shocking, as these two women navigate a world where guns are as ho-hum as asking a neighbor for flour. But as one character observes, “once you get a gun, you’re at 99.6 degrees Fahrenheit all the time” and the minute a gun enters their Mercury, their lives will never be the same. Jennifer Clement is a talented writer, with prose that made me jitter with excitement and fear for the gun love embedded within her novel and beyond. --Al Woodworth