I received a copy of Tracks by Eric D. Goodman from the author in exchange for an honest review.

The setting: a train. The characters: its passengers. In a series of overlapping short stories, the latter are introduced. As each takes the spotlight for a story, as the train makes its steady way from Baltimore to Chicago, the tales of those aboard unfold.

My first thought when I heard about Tracks was that the premise and the way the novel’s format reflected it sounded quite intriguing. Goodman pulls these off even better than I’d hoped. I’ve never read anything quite like Tracks.

My full review is posted on Erin Reads. ( )

Tracks is not a typical railroad novel in the tradition of Spearman, Packard, or Bedwell. Instead, it is a collection of character studies of a group of sixteen fictional individuals. It begins in the station in Baltimore with the boarding of an inter-city passenger train. Eventually, after they have settled in and the train is underway, the members of the books' cast gravitate to center stage, the Amtrak lounge car, where their stories unfold.

The subtitle "A Novel in Stories" perfectly describes the structure of the author's creation. This is because the characters and their raison d'être, both in life and on this particular train, inhabit their own literary and literal space. Each chapter is a self contained point-of-view story describing details of each individual’s life, their reason for being on this particular train, their awareness of their surroundings and the other passengers. They are an eclectic mix of people; male, female, young, old, married, single, divorced, and of varying emotional and intellectual capacities. Their occupations include business, the arts, the military, crime and, of course, railroad employee.

In addition to sharing passage on the train the transients also share the attentions of its one permanent human fixture; Franklin, the Amtrak conductor. His formal and informal interaction with each of the passengers provides a thread of continuity as the book shifts the reader’s attention from one traveler to the next. Within the confines of the train tragedies unfold, lessons are learned, and some conflicts both internal and external are explored. However, as in life there is no tidy resolution. When the train arrives in Chicago this fact is summed up by the final observation concerning Franklin who knows another trip will bring other stories: "The conductor had come to the end of another line...All of the passengers were long gone...but already he found himself wondering what sort of soul would greet him on the train back to Baltimore."

I found Tracks to be an interesting collection of stories. ( )

Tracks by Eric D. Goodman is a expressive and reflective novel told in stories or what some would call a short story collection published by Maryland-based publisher Atticus Books, and unlike other short story collections, there are very few weak stories, if any. Each protagonist in the story is on the train headed somewhere and each of their lives is in transition, from a young woman on the verge of promotion who must decide between lover and career to a man and woman at the end of their years who must face their fears. Goodman is adept at ensuring readers care about his characters in just a few pages, and even though the end of each story comes quickly, there is rarely a sense that there was more to the story that was not told.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/01/tracks-by-eric-d-goodman.html ( )