The Toothache Tree

By Jack Galloway

Book Overview

A kidnapper and his teenaged captive in forced togetherness in the woods, amid the real-life beauty, fascination, and cruelty, of Nature. Fun-filled, suspenseful, and heartwarming. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595162215
• ISBN13: 9780595162215
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Fatherhood from Outside the Family

It's a cliche, but one sign of a good book is that you read it in one sitting, that you can't put it down. The twin engines of gripping action/adventure and heartwarming man-boy love story kept me galloping through "The Toothache Tree." It's a very good book which I highly recommend.Why not five stars then? Well, its main character, a kidnapper with a heart of gold named "Bill" is a nuanced character with both attributes and flaws. But the parents of the 15-year-old boy (Ham Jr. nicknamed Buddy) he kidnaps have too few redeeming qualities. No doubt there are greedy utilites barons like Hamilton Caine and melodramatic social butterflies like Melanie Caine, but these characters are not presented in a balanced way. And despite some fine lines, Galloway's prose is occasionally clunky. Also, the politically correct (of whom I'm not one) might take issue with Galloway's dated definition of masculinity. When the kidnapper and boy turn from enemies to friends, they drink whiskey together and shoot deer. His depiction of Native Americans might get the cuffs put on the author by the P.C. police as well. But these flaws are overcome by the novel's strengths: a learned love of the land, a nice sense of plot and pacing, some harrowing action, and a tender, wholly believable love between males of different generations. Galloway pulls another neat trick in "Toothache Tree": He walks a thrilling line between eroticism and friendship. Middle-aged Bill and adolescent Buddy never have sex of any kind in the novel, but their bond is certainly charged with sensuality. Buddy is "handsome." His bright blue eyes are much remarked on. He wears skimpy red bikini underwear. Though bathing and swimming are natural outdoor activities, the hunter and his acolyte seem to get naked every chance they get, much like Jim and Huckleberry Finn. The novel is in the tradition of classic masculine American literature like that of James Fennimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Jack London. London's wolf is even present as Bill's trusty dog Brutus. It mirrors an American book of only 10 years before: Robert Bly's "Iron John." Like Bly's man-and-boy-bonding-in-the-woods story, "The Toothache Tree" has asexual eros, rite-of-passage challenges, and a bond forged in steel by the end. Galloway's spoiled-rich-kid-turned-capable-outdoorsman theme also recalls Rudyard Kipling's "Captain's Courageous." Galloway's great accomplishment here is to take a psychologically unlikely scenario--a terrified victim of kidnapping forging a lifelong blood brotherhood with his abductor in a matter of days--and render it largely believable. Galloway strikes a nice balance between describing the mundane tasks and transcendent delights of wilderness living. Bill's passion for fleeing civilization, the theme of so many great American books, is unquestionable. So is his ability to handle "roughing it" in this manner and the joy he takes in passing his knowledge along. His love of nature is matc

If there was ever serendipty, this is it.

It is difficult to imagine a more adversarial relationship than that which begins THE TOOTHACHE TREE, by Jack Galloway. In this thoroughly satisfying read, 15 year-old Ham Caine is kidnapped, bound, gagged, stuffed into a cotton sack, then hauled off to deep, foreboding, Texas woods to be held for ransom. His kidnapper maintains a gruff, stern demeanor while the boy hopes for some way to kill him. Plans for ransoming take an immediate tumble when the boy divulges that his parents are somewhere in the South Pacific on a self-indulgent sailboat cruise, forcing a more prolonged togetherness there in those sweltering woods than the kidnapper had anticipated. In short order, the real characters of the pair are revealed-the boy is desperate for a caring, loving father, but no wimp himself. A lot more soft-hearted than a kidnapper ought to be, the man-dubbed "Bill," after a Teddy bear the boy once had-finds in that spunky kid something that had been missing in his life: a son. A one-time loser, matrimonially, he had long been aware of that basic, masculine need, but he never allowed himself to think about it. To no one's surprise, the pair form a quick bond-however unlikely, under the circumstances-there in those beautiful but tough, unyielding woods. It's almost as though there is too much to enjoy in their newfound relationship, and too little time to enjoy it, to maintain the original hostility. The kidnapper-a private pilot who once flew for the company headed by the boy's greedy, power-hungry father-is a natural teacher, delighting in enlightening the kid about the woods, about nature, and about life. The boy, no longer a captive, loves every minute of it, rejoicing in the discovery of a freedom and a sense of personal joy and companionship that he had never even imagined. The forest puts on an entrancing show: on a morning squirrel hunt, to provide breakfast, a ground fog rises up to become an "awesome" pink cloud in the trees above the pair, while squirrels gambol from limb to limb like will-o-the-wisps as man and boy begin quietly to enjoy each other. On a trek down the tree-arbored creek, they discover fresh cougar tracks in the sand. A poisonous snake dangles from a tree directly in their path. Coyotes, and wolves howl at night. The kid learns much of woodcraft, while the man learns the joys of having a son. There is badminton on a makeshift court beneath the trees, and skinny-dipping in the icy creek. And soap that floats. All the while, a skillful, clever FBI agent is doggedly determined to discover and capture the kidnapper; and a mother and father almost too easy to hate are more concerned about their appearance at a press conference on their return from the South Seas than for the safety of their only son. The son would be happy if they never returned. But fate is fickle, and for all the joy the idyll brings to the man and boy, things get pretty rough there in those Texas woods-dishing up a major helping of nerve-tin