This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I’m recommending Scavengers, a funny and heartbreaking debut novel by fiction writer Kathleen Boland.
After being fired for taking an uncharacteristic risk at her commodities trading job, Bea Macon sublets her New York apartment and books a one-way ticket to stay with her mother, Christy, a free spirit who has been living in Salt Lake City on Bea’s dime. Usually the responsible one, Bea is not about to admit exactly why she’s suddenly decided to visit, but she isn’t the only one keeping secrets. Her mom has a new man, a map, and a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western United States.
Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks, an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s arranged a rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the guy she’s been obsessively trading theories with online to prove it. Out in the desert where one believes it to be a promised land, and the other sees a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative quest than either of them could have imagined.
Full of complex, spirited characters and richly detailed, Scavengers is so much more than your typical adventure novel. Utterly charming, and emotionally heartbreaking, this mother-daughter duo’s unlikely trek west in search of buried treasure, not only promises the chance for immense wealth but just might give them a chance to heal and find their way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options.
Check out Scavengers and other literary fiction like it at the Sioux City Public Library.
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