This literary novel is a gripping, beautifully and meticulously well-written story of the way we cope with internal and external issues in our world. It tells the tale of what happens when you let obsession unravel the thread of oneself and family.

This story is told in Emma, a teenage girl’s perspective. The world around Emma becomes a harder, dangerous place even though it had been that way before. But now her family is involved and she can’t ignore the cruelty and injustice around her. We experience Emma’s unraveling choices and the reasoning behind each of them as she changes throughout this novel, trying to cope with the pain caused to her dad. Watching her change in this book was gripping and painful. I wanted someone to pull her back from the edge.

The family dynamics in this book were amazing. Each character had beautiful quirks and flaws. And it was brilliant the way food was used to convey the current state of relationships in the family. If Emma and her mother were fighting, Emma’s lunch the next day would be all her least favorite foods. They never ate before her father got home. Punishment was not eating at the table with the family. Every family has different ways of coping with issues, and this family’s was the control of food.

Sometimes I wanted to scream while reading. I give major kudos to Wiltz for that because she made me feel SO much while reading this novel. I was angry at the evilness, frustrated with Emma and the path she was heading down, and terrified where Wiltz was going to take this. Would this story have a happy ending? Could it get worse? How will Emma come out of all this? Can’t someone stop her for goodness sakes?! It was intense. And when I finished . . . well my heart sort of felt like someone gripped it in their fist and dug their nails in.

Jenni Wiltz is a talented author. There is not a thing I would change about this novel. You can tell that Wiltz went through every single sentence in this novel to make it as strong as possible. Everything was in place. Every detail was important. There were parts of the novel that I wanted to look away because it was so well written it made me queasy.

In The Red Road: A Novel, a teenager in a predominantly Mexican town is forced to thrive among gangs, violence, and poverty. Emma, the main character, tries to make sense of her father’s brutal assault by a Mexican gang and distances herself from Via, Rachel, and her other companions. The author is extremely successful in creating an often dismal mood and sharp imagery, reflecting Emma’s pain and the seeming indifference of her mother and little sister. In dealing with her husband’s gruesome injuries, Emma’s mother chooses to feed her family rather than committing to medical care without health insurance coverage, so Emma fears that her father’s condition may deteriorate and realizes that the stress from his ordeal is causing him to wither inside. Convinced that she is the only one left who will stand up for her family, Emma resorts to violence to avenge her father’s attack and hopes to permanently remove the threat. This leaves readers shocked that the author of The Red Road: A Novel reconstructed Emma’s character into a fearless, reckless, and selfless individual and courageously catapulted the plot into a wall that, in the end, crumbles under a crime of passion.