Snakeskin Road: A Novel

by James Braziel

In this powerful and moving new novel by James Braziel, author of Birmingham, 35 Miles , a woman begins a harrowing journey of survival along a passage of terror--and hope.... They call it Snakeskin Road. An ever-changing network of highways, rivers, and forgotten trails, it's used by profiteers of a grim new traffic in human cargo. The catastrophic climatic changes that transformed the Southeast into a vast, inhospitable desert have left its desperate...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553385038
• ISBN13: 9780553385038
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

makes Mad Max look like a still life

In 2044 recently widowed Jennifer Harrison is pregnant and desperately needs to return to her hometown Chicago where her mom lives. Currently she is in the vast desert of what was once the southeastern United States; the entire region destroyed by a hole in the Ozone layer. However to become free she needs to escape Birmingham and become an indentured servant for three years in the Midwest. She travels up the Snakeskin Road used by human traffickers. Her bus crashes and she becomes guardian of thirteen year old Mazy. As they struggle northward on the deadly trail, Rosser the ruthless bounty hunter pursues them as no one leaves Birmingham alive. In Illinois Jennifer is indentured to a brothel where she believes she can survive three years if Rosser is not a customer. Mindful of his own work, BIRMINGHAM, 35 MILES, James Braziel paints a dark, gloomy future landscape especially the expanding desert widening like a new Ice Age that makes Mad Max look like a still life. The story line is fast-paced because anything less means unburied death for those who dawdle. Jennifer is terrific as a heroine on the run with a teen to protect; but it is Rosser who steals the show as a futuristic Tom Loker before the Quaker revelation in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Although the too many regional idioms and southern dialect anchor the locale, it detracts from the post-apocalyptic view of the journey north on SNAKESKIN ROAD; a path with no conductors, only killing traffickers and desperate escaped slaves dare venture on this lethal "Underground Railroad". Harriet Klausner