2011, 58 pages, set in 10 point type with 1 inch margins

One’s confidence in a book is shaken somewhat when the title is misspelled on the 104 word dustcover, and that it is accompanied by another misspelling.

When one turns to the interior page and sees that the publisher has not properly spaced the names of the authors, one begins to suspect the publisher, rather than the author.

When the reader then discovers that the type has been set in 10 point and the page count was beefed up by using extra wide margins, that line drop errors have not been corrected, and that basic editing such as separating dialog from narrative, and using uniform line breaks and spacing in the text, then the publisher is indicted in the mind’s eye and one feels better about reading the author’s story.

It is not necessary to read Country Boy, as back story is woven in nicely upon the introduction of key characters, and not in a fashion that would spoil the first book if the reader is of a mind to try it.

The main characters are Q, who is only addressed by his ‘government name’ of Quentel, by the authorities, and his vicious killer babe Van, who has a pit bull and a 9mm. The government has screwed up on Q’s case by mishandling evidence and he is being released by a judge that knows he is guilty. This big body beautiful country boy is now set to take out the upstart gangster that took over his drug territory while Van and her girls torture and kill the male and female snitches who put him behind bars.

The cast is large and varied, the story has a good pace, and the violence is not overdone. I disagree with how the author spelled some ebonic terms, but that is a quibbling matter of ghetto scholarship best settled over a forty and some lake trout. The following is a sample of the moral gravity of the urban fiction genre from page 39:

“That’s the way niggas get popped, trying to get a cheaper price.”

What I liked about the setting was the ghetto mindset that ‘the government’ is the enemy, a vast faceless machine that the criminals are at war with. Country Boy is Bonnie and Clyde for the 21st Century marginally literate urbanite. The violence and the sex are not over done, much of it being inferred. This has the effect of maintaining the nihilistic perspective in the reader’s mind, as opposed to jarring the reader into disassociating himself from a nihilistic spectacle.

Reading Country By 2 was not the wasted hour that I expected, but an entertaining glance at society through the hate-filled lens shared by roughly 5% of American society. If you read Country Boy 2, keep in mind that approximately 15 million humans see our world through the jaded-in-youth eyes of Q and Van.