Gas Money - Softcover

Lewis, Troy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1514135949 ISBN 13: 9781514135945

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

Gas Money is a heartwarming, honest narrative that shows how the everyday people we come in contact with can shape our lives forever. Packed with much humor, lots of inspiration and occasional sadness, the collection of true stories captures the perspective and imagination of a six-year-old black boy growing up in 1960s Virginia and his soul-searching journey over the next five decades.

About this title

About the Author

Troy Lewis was born and raised in the tiny town of Saluda, Virginia (population 769). He currently resides in New Jersey and enjoys writing. Gas Money is his first foray into the literary world.

Review

From Publishers Weekly

First-time author Lewis crafts a warmly told memoir about growing up in a small Virginia town in the 1960s, paying tribute to the people who helped shape his life and “all of the gas money you have been given—the angels and achievements, the devils and derailments that possibly influenced your life choices.” For Lewis, this primarily means his parents, whose turbulent marriage provides the backdrop for his experiences as a young African-American boy in an area where “there were no ‘social’ interactions between blacks and whites” until schools were integrated in 1969. Lewis finds much support from various teachers throughout his life, as well as an important lesson from a cousin that “there’ll be lots of things in your life that you won’t know how to do, but it’s okay to not know how to do them.” But it isn’t until a midlife crisis of self-doubt pushes him to the brink of suicide that he decides to look back and reflect on “the 50 years of ‘gas money’ that had shaped my life,” which leads him to realize just how much fuel he was given by important people to help him “get to my next destination.” This is an affecting and sympathetic look at the complexities of family life.

From Huffington Post

Reading Gas Money by Troy Lewis is like sitting with him on his Aunt Jenny's front porch in Middlesex County, Virginia, while he unwinds the stories of his life, and what a storyteller he is. Gas Money is about growing up under segregation and then desegregation in a dysfunctional family, but encountering numerous "angels" along the way who provide him with "gas money," lessons learned that took him further in life than he ever expected to go. Aunt Jenny and sanctioned segregation are long gone, but not the effects on his life as well as that of so many others.

...Lewis is the main character of the book, but if there are villains in the story, they are alternately played by his father and mother. His mother turns out to an antihero of sorts by teaching him right from wrong the hard way, with discipline, harsh words and sometimes a switch. Nonetheless, from today's vantage point of understanding how hard her life was, Lewis has forgiven her and is grateful for what she did for him.

...Gas Money is written in a naïf style, somewhat unintentionally I assume, but it adds to the tale that makes it hard to put the book down. It is more than worthy for transformation into a screenplay, and if I wrote it, I would open with a scene of Lewis being interviewed by CSPAN at the Harlem Book Fair, the only author interviewed there in July of 2015. He is as eloquent and charming as he comes across in the book. The screenplay would go on to tell the tale through flashbacks of his mother raising eight children at the age of 20, her own two as well as her siblings left by her parents who, unable to support them in Middlesex County, went north for jobs.

...Gas Money is a terrific read, available at Amazon and on Kindle, and certainly should be on store shelves for broader distribution. Hopefully, this review will provide Lewis with "gas money" to take him even further as an author. It would certainly enrich us all.

An Innocent View of Growing Up in the Segregated South
- Jane Cutler Yepez

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1514135949
• ISBN 13: 9781514135945
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 394