Made in the U.S.A.

Billie Letts

Edition	Hardcover
List Price	$24.99
	$16.49 (Save 34%)

Published by	Grand Central Publishing
Release date	2008-06-19
ISBN	044652901X
Availability	Usually ships in 24 hours

The bestselling author of WHERE THE HEART IS returns with a heartrending tale of two children in search of a place to call home.

Lutie McFee's history has taught her to avoid attachments...to people, to places, and to almost everything. With her mother long dead and her father long gone to find his fortune in Las Vegas, 15-year-old Lutie lives in the god-forsaken town of Spearfish, South Dakota with her twelve-year-old brother, Fate, and Floy Satterfield, the 300-pound ex-girlfriend of her father. While Lutie shoplifts for kicks, Fate spends most of his time reading, watching weird TV shows and worrying about global warming and the endangerment of pandas. As if their life is not dismal enough, one day, while shopping in their local Wal-Mart, Floy keels over and the two motherless kids are suddenly faced with the choice of becoming wards of the state or hightailing it out of town in Floy's old Pontiac. Choosing the latter, they head off to Las Vegas in search of a father who has no known address, no phone number and, clearly, no interest in the kids he left behind.

MADE IN THE U.S.A. is the alternately heartbreaking and life-affirming story of two gutsy children who must discover how cruel, unfair and frightening the world is before they come to a place they can finally call home.

Customer Reviews - courtesy of Amazon.com ( Marked4Sale.com is not responsible for review content )

Billie at her Best!

Love this Author and have corresponded with her a few times. She writes about people that are often forgotten by the rest of us. This new book is the best Ever! The first part of it does happen sorry to say. So it is very believable if you open your mind! Hope they make a movie out of this book. Love all her books, but this one is just Awesome! A must read!

Somewhat of a disappointment .....

After I read "Where The Heart Is," I became a Billie Letts fan, impatiently awaiting the next novel. And the next. "The Honk and the Holler Opening Soon" did not disappoint. "Shoot the Moon" wasn't quite as good. I was THRILLED when I saw "Made in the USA" had been released and immediately ordered it. Sadly, about the only good thing I can say about this book is that the cover art is glorious. This book was apparently written to show the harder side of life, but it's pretty darn brutal, which is why the Disappointment Factor. The thing that I love about Billie's stories are the friendships and bonds that form between her characters. I'm not a prude or a conservative, but reading this book is not the pleasure ride it was in "Where The Heart Is" and "The Honk and the Holler Opening Soon," two books that were hard to put down. Sure, there were tragedies in those stories that shocked, but for some reason, this novel and the life these two kids lead in Vegas .... it's just way too much brutality ... something I didn't expect in a Billie Letts novel. I have maybe 75 pages left of this book and I'm just not enjoying it and have yet to find even one sympathetic bone for Lutie, the main character. That's why I have 75 pages left to read and its been sitting on my coffee table for 2 weeks. Maybe Billie will surprise me in the end, but so far, just disappointed. Sadly.

Made in the USA

Lutie McFee, fifteen years old, is spending a fairly normal day shopping with her eleven-year-old brother Fate [it was apparently supposed to be "Fale" but the third letter was inadvertently crossed, producing the name by which he's been known since birth] and their dad's last girlfriend, a three-hundred-pound women known as Floy [it was supposed to have been "Florence"] with whom they've been living since their father walked out on them one typically drunken night about a year before. [Their mother had died many years before.] Lutie didn't get along that well with Floy, but it was home, after all. To the extent that Spearfish, South Dakota can be home. Lutie spends her time shoplifting for kicks as well as for material gain. Her brother, on the other hand, `sometimes seemed to Lutie more like an old man than a child. He wore thick glasses with wire frames, worried about global warming and the endangerment of pandas," and "spends most of his time reading, watching weird TV shows about lighthouses, Roman baths, prairie dogs, Jack Kerouac, and the Khmer Empire--subjects that nobody else would give two hoots about."

But when Floy dies suddenly at the Wal-Mart check-out counter, their life turns upside down. Unwilling to be put in the foster care system, Lutie steals Floy's old Pontiac and determines to go to Las Vegas, the last place known to have housed her father, the town drunk who'd disappeared long ago; with her brother--the weirdest boy in school, and the smartest, too---despite the fact that that father had no known address, phone number, or any apparent interest in his two young children. When Lutie is about to leave and head out for Las Vegas, her brother begs her to take him with her, saying "You're the only one I got, Lutie. There ain't no one else." "Lutie turned then, angry enough to take a swing at him. Instead, she saw what she didn't want to see. A boy whose small, thin body was already bowed by loss . . . the brother whose face already bore the book of defeat and whose eyes, filling now with tears, had already seen too much disappointment." In turn, Lutie is a girl whose "history had taught her to avoid attachments . . . to people, to places, to almost everything . . . She made few concessions to sentimentality." But the siblings embark on this new path together. "It didn't matter then that she and her brother were hungry and broke. Didn't matter that they hadn't bathed in days or that they'd had nothing to call home but an old Pontiac. They had made it to Las Vegas, the most glamorous place on earth, the place where her life would finally begin."

The tale is not a mystery as such, beyond the fact that Floy's death is followed in very short order by another death --what, if anything, is the connection? - and the identity of the mysterious Good Samaritan, a seeming guardian angel who appears in their life when most needed, with food, a portable radio, information vital to their survival on the streets such as the location of shelters and `soup kitchens,' etc. But this is a novel rich in character study as well as the ways in which life can beat one down or uplift one when it seems least likely to do so, and the heartbreaking way in which these two children survive their circumstances, whether that means the death of loved ones, meeting up with deranged hitchhikers while fleeing Speerfish, life on the streets in the most challenging and frightening of places to attempt that. The guardian angel turns out to be someone with quite a story of his own. Each of these characters displays a resiliency that allows them to at least attempt to regain a meaningful life no matter the obstacles placed in his or her way.

The author is a member of the talented family one of whose members, Tracy Letts, wrote the Pulitzer-winning play, "August, Osage County," with another appearing on stage on that show until his sudden death not long into its Broadway run - a play, incidentally, fraught with the interactions of dysfunctional family members in startling, nay stunning, ways, and one which led this reviewer to want to read the work produced by another creative mind in this family, and very happy to have done so. Outside the normal genre of books which my husband and I favor, this is a book well worth reading.

A Feel Good Read

I've read all of Billie Letts' novels to this point. You may have heard of her first one - 'Where the Heart Is'- a New york Times bestseller, an Oprah pick and also made into a movie starring Natalie Portman. It is the story of a young pregnant teen who lives in the local Wal Mart.

Made in the U.S.A. returns to Wal Mart. Lutie and Fate McFee's father ran off to Las Vegas a year ago, leaving them behind with his girlfriend Floy. While shopping at the local Wal Mart, Floy drops dead. Fifteen year old Lutie decides that they shouldn't wait around for social services to put them into foster care, so they take Floy's car and head off to Vegas to find their dad.

With little money and unable to find their dad, they try to survive in Sin City. Some unknown good Samaritan seems to be watching out for them, leaving food and notes on the hood of the car they're living in - but it's not enough. Lutie and Fate are soon subjected to the ugly side of Vegas.

I'll stop there without going any further into the plot and spoiling the tale.

Letts' hallmark seems to be that family is not always biological. This theme was also the basis for 'The Honk and Holler Opening Soon'. And it's done well again in Made in the U.S.A.

Although it becomes somewhat predicable as to what's going to happen in the end, it is still an enjoyable, feel good read that will have you cheering for Lutie and Fate and the resilience of the human spirit.

Letts and her Idylls

A charming book, for the most part, but Letts' weakness lies in her desire to merge her idyllic notions of race and family with the world of Oklahoma, which is not the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of multicultural, multiracial harmony and acceptance. This time Hispanic culture gets the nod, but in her writing she prefer the softer, nicer conclusions of people's emotional foibles and racial histories. Just as in Where The Heart Is, in which Native American boys, African American Men, white women ex-drunks, and naive, pregnant teenagers live together in harmonious convergence, this novel presumes a harmony it doesn't quite deserve. Ms. Letts probably thinks her narrative is "real," but I find it a bit stilted and contrived, despite the affection one naturally feels for many of her characters. If Ms. Letts would learn not to control her characters, they might do some surprising and interesting things, like going into the imaginative dark places that they touch upon sometimes but never quite enter. For a much better version of the difficulties of Oklahoma, race, and sexuality, I recommend Gary Reed's startling book, Pryor Rendering.