Norton's Ghost, by R. Canepa, is a first person narrative about Kyle, a young college student who finds out his father died, leaving him without any family and leading him to question his current life. After his father's funeral, he doesn't return to that life, a business major with no real purpose or goal. Instead, he just starts walking.

As Kyle walks, the reader is introduced to the harshness of the road. Rain and hunger stand out among the road's trials. Throughout Part One, Kyle meets several people who make an impression, both on him and on the reader. The tone of the book changes in Part Two. Kyle reaches San Fransisco and ends up staying for a while. The city as Kyle experiences it feels real. It's dirty and dark. The homeless do what they can to survive, and some of them don't. Death is a pervading theme in this book, and Kyle's emotions affected me as I read.

There is a part of our being that recognizes death not on the pure physical level but at a layer much deeper than we can be aware of consciously. I think that awareness was what I was feeling as I sat on the curb and wept while strangers walked a wide path around me. It made me feel small, temporary, insignificant.

Kyle's time in the city is not all dark. He meets people who form a family of sorts, and these connections bring light and hope to his story. I think he learned something from everyone he met, and these people stay with him even after he leaves San Fransisco to continue his journey.

Part Three brings Kyle more heartache and more self-discovery. Back on the road, he seeks answers to questions that he was carrying with him since the beginning of the book. He finds a reason to reconnect with the world and become part of it again. With a renewed sense of self and a purpose, Kyle ends his narrative on a positive note that satisfied me as a reader and as someone who had become emotionally involved with his journey.

As a person who predominantly reads genre fiction, Norton's Ghost was a departure for me. I also am not a huge fan of first person narrative. I still thoroughly enjoyed this book. I read an advance copy with a pencil in hand as a proofreader, and I'm sure that I missed things because I was too caught up in the story.

When I first started reading, I was a bit distracted by the writing. It seemed wordy and rambling, but as I continued to read, I was able to accept this as Kyle's voice. One of first person's qualities is that it is meant to immerse the reader in a character. If the character is very different from the reader, this is a hard thing for a writer to achieve. As someone who has tried to write, I noticed how different the narrative was from anything I would write in first person, and so it took me a little while to settle into feeling like Kyle. But Kyle is a very real character, and I think he's relatable. Everyone has experienced loss, everyone has wondered why they're here, what they're supposed to be doing. His emotions and thoughts felt genuine and immediate--something first person is well-suited to portray.

My forays into writing fiction have always been sci-fi or fantasy, and so I've never used real-world settings in a work of fiction. It's something I've always been nervous about, never quite knowing how to portray a place as fiction while still being true to the location. Canepa does an excellent job of this in Norton's Ghost. This is important in a story about traveling--if the places don't feel real, the whole story will seem off. I never doubted the realism in any of the places that Kyle visited.

Norton's Ghost is about discovery. It's about really experiencing life. Any story about life on the road will talk about the pleasure of eating a meal or taking a shower when such basics are difficult to come by. This is something that Kyle describes, but it isn't glorified or elaborated on at length. It simply is there as a fact of such a life. This book left me not with the desire to hitchhike around California, but with the desire to really live life, not to just float through it with my mind always elsewhere. Kyle's journey is one that anyone can understand and relate to.

Norton's Ghost will be available in late September 2009. Visit http://nortonsghost.com/ and follow @roncanepa on Twitter for more information.