J. Oliver Padgett (2026) Son of September.

I’ve read J. Oliver Padgett’s work on ABCtales.  I’d be able to pick out his writing from others by his measured style and a quirk that stands out like a thumbprint. I didn’t pay much attention to the title page or the title. But it made sense in the end.

This is a short book. Just over 200 pages. It can be read in one sitting, which I could easily have done. But I left the last 20 or 30 pages until my concentration was better. And to give it the attention it deserved.

It’s not set in the Summer of 1991 as described on the back page. But begins with a Prologue and October 1991.

It then suggests ‘two foster children in South Florida start hearing a voice through equipment that is dead.’

There were around 500 000 foster children in the United States then. Padgett’s protagonist Levi in one of them. Not wanted. Not seen. Good at being invisible and getting by. Part of the great uncared for cared for most of who graduate to the other institutions and remain in poverty.

Mari is not fostered. Her parents and grandmamma are Cuban refugees. Drifting South. Following the poverty line of making do. Padgett has a feel for how endless work ends in more endless work and just too little to pay the bills.

What made a difference was the Tandy computer with its luminescent green writing. That was high-tech then. He and she did not hear a voice. Equipment then didn’t have that capacity. But he could connect with others.

I wrote a more conventional story on ABCtales featuring a boy and a similar dial-up-network and the time and the noise it made connecting. I can’t mind the name of it. Something with a Tuesday (I think).

Padgett’s storyline or genre I couldn’t place. At first I thought it was like Stephen King and Salem’s Lot. The conventional normal that wasn’t. Then he had me thinking of A Prayer for Owen Meany. John Irvine’s great American novel about god and fate and freewill, with a bit of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim thrown in. That bastard British-Irish-Indian boy trained to see and not be seen in The Great Game.  

  Mari, the female protagonist, also answers the call of the green ink.

The written voice that speaks to both of them seems to have supernatural powers. The reader (me) doesn’t know what its purpose is and whether it is benign or demonic?

I really enjoyed reading this book. Sometimes we don’t say what we feel, but dress it up in verbiage. Buy a copy. You deserve it.

https://amzn.eu/d/06TNWMeW