The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles's The Lincoln Highway is a high-spirited and adventurous American road novel, involving four boys — three reform school teenagers, plus a precocious 8-year-old — who travel from rural Nebraska to New York City in the 1950s in search of a better life. Towles's prose has a quiet intensity, but the book's themes are earnestly formulaic ("How easily we forget — we in the business of storytelling — that life was the point all along") and its characters often behave in calculated ways (and with a maturity that is unlikely for their age).