You’ve Got Something Coming
Fiction by Jonathan Starke
Black Heron Press, April 2020
A title you may have missed at the start of the pandemic, You’ve Got Something Coming is worth a throwback look. This breakthrough debut novel is about a down-and-outer and his small daughter and his attempt to give them a better life. Trucks, an aging boxer with only thirty dollars, breaks his deaf daughter, Claudia, out of a children’s home in Wisconsin one night during the dead of winter. He gives her used hearing aids, and they begin hitchhiking to Nevada. Claudia is a winsome, feisty little girl who tries to hold her father to account, and Trucks loves her unconditionally. Claudia’s mother, an addict, has disappeared and is likely dead.