Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Paperback)

This inventive allegorical premise sets the scene for a story that is full of frustration, heartache and loss, as Michael's family and friends are left to shoulder the emotional burden and remake their lives against a background of limited opportunity and endless financial constraints. The story begins when Michael is sixteen years old. One day, all the men in Maple Rock miraculously disappear - rumour has it that they have gone to the moon. Downsizing has become commonplace, factories seem to just vaporize, and many of the men have found themselves out of work. The disappeared all knew each other from the local church, the Black Lantern Bar, and even the bowling league.

Michael, his cousin Nick, his younger brother Kolya, and his best buddy Tom step readily into the disconsolate drunkenness of their fathers. Angry, young, and pumped up with adrenaline and booze they wonder the local neighborhood with violence and resentment in their hearts. They take on awful jobs at the local shopping mall just to get by, and party with the college girls in Ann Arbor while entertaining a half-baked fantasy that one day their fathers will return and be proud of them. Growing up is a struggle, as they "trample over things, and tear things down." Even the mothers have to learn how to cope and they eventually find their feet - first in jobs and drinking, then in new men, whom they will marry and then leave with for better suburbs.

But even though it's a struggle, life goes on and Michael eventually goes to community college. Through part luck and a kind of doggedly persistence, he gradually works his way towards a degree and a career in local journalism. Along the way he experiences the joys and heartache of true love with a sexy older woman, and finds the comfort of marriage and family life with a colleague from the local bookstore. Like his father, he begins to take little steps towards the moon, but when thrown back into the arms of his friends, he finds with a certain regret, that Maple Rock is his world. And it's a world where there's no difference between our deepest wishes and our deepest fears, as "they all merge together eventually."

Bakopoulos' sure-footed prose is infused with a gritty realism, as the day-to-day struggles of those who survive on the breadline are dramatically laid bare. But Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is also a story of hope, promise, and of young boys eventually becoming grown men. We witness their marriages and divorces, their births and their deaths, their baptisms and their sins. Bakopoulos has rendered a world where loneliness sends us into dark places with a day-to-day sadness and where courageousness and heroism is fully grounded in concrete experience. Mike Leonard February 05.