“I dare you to follow Chad Holley’s endearingly philosophical and downright hilarious young narrator Michael through his neighborhood of radiant characters and escapades. Shield the Joyous is a triumphant debut and joins a short shelf of indelible books on American boyhood. I haven’t read many novels that made me miss so much a place I have never been.”
—Maria Hummel, author of Goldenseal and Motherland
“Among its countless and unforgettable pleasures, Shield the Joyous is a glorious act of reclamation, conjuring those childhood moments of consciousness, landscape and emotion where the sweetest mysteries are found.”
—Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World, I Am the Light of This World, and other novels; recipient of the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize
MICHAEL HALEY, a whip-smart seventh-grader growing up in rural Mississippi in the early 1980s, has a precociously metaphysical turn of mind, a brand-new girlfriend who won’t come out of her bedroom, and plenty of neighborhood pals to distract him from both. But as he passes the long afternoon of this story roaming their streets, yards, and woods with the likes of Zeke Barry (his girlfriend’s brother and a born skeptic) and John Dixon Montgomery (a diminutive fishing genius plagued by assorted maladies), unsettling questions won’t leave Michael alone—like whether God will accept his gift of a dug-up, three-days-dead possum, whether he and his friends are in fact real, and why Ol’ Cletus, a mysterious, middle-aged recluse, appears to be stalking him. This last question, above all, will test Michael’s courage to seek answers.
With a voice all his own, swinging from sassy to lyrical in its candor, wonder, and spiritual yearning, Michael Haley stands squarely in the tradition of beloved young American narrators that stretches from Huck Finn through Holden Caulfield to Scout Finch. Imagine a cheeky blend of Charles Portis and Stranger Things filtered through St. Augustine and Zhuangzi, and you have some idea of this brilliant debut novel by Chad Holley. Shield the Joyous manages to be both deeply funny and moving in a way that is singularly authentic.