You Can See More From Up Here

                                                                                             Mark Guerin

Mark has written a story that will resonate with many who are learning to live with other ethnic groups in their towns and cities.  This is a story of learning to accept others and trying to understand where you and them are coming from.  He also wrote this story on how to work through various familial problems, as he does with his sister and his father and all his various friends from high school to adulthood.  ‘You Can See More From Up Here’ is a title that was well chosen both physically and emotionally for Walker will the answers to his various issues from his vantage point of the physical setting of his family’s house and yard as well as he writes his memoir on his laptop that helps him to sort things out before sharing with others and starting his new job and new life in his hometown.

Mark Guerin has written this novel that could be used as a supplemental read for social workers and counselors, and maybe even nurses who want to help in anyway they can, even if it is the way Walker is doing it.  This is a story of living with the decisions you make right or wrong and learning how to communicate your needs as well as the needs of others.

Book Summary

  In 2004, when middle-aged Walker Maguire is called to the deathbed of his estranged father, his thoughts return to 1974. He’d worked that summer at the auto factory where his dad, an unhappily retired Air Force colonel, was employed as plant physician. Witness to a bloody fight falsely blamed on a Mexican immigrant, Walker kept quiet, fearing his white co-workers and tyrannical father. Lies snowball into betrayals, leading to a life-long rift between father and son that can only be mended by the past coming back to life and revealing its long-held secrets. You Can See More From Up Here is a coming-of-age tale about the illusion of privilege and the power of the past to inform and possibly heal the present.

About the Author

Mark Guerin is a 2014 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program in Boston. He also has an MFA from Brandeis University and is a winner of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, the Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting and Sigma Tau Delta’s Eleanor B. North Poetry Award. A contributor to the novelist’s blog, Dead Darlings, he is also a playwright, copywriter and journalist.