A book blast for The Road to Delano by John DeSimone

It’s 1968, and a strike by field workers in the grape fields has ripped an otherwise quiet central California town down the middle. Jack Duncan is a Delano high school senior who is on his way to earning a baseball scholarship, hoping to escape the turmoil infesting his town. His mother has kept from him the real cause of his father’s death, who was a prominent grower. But when an old friend hands Jack evidence indicating his father was murdered, he is compelled to dig deeper. This throws him and his best friend and teammate, Adrian Sanchez, whose father is a striking field worker, into the labor conflict led by Cesar Chavez. Road to Delano is the path Jack and Adrian must take to find their strength, their duty, and their destiny.

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An ARC copy was gifted to me by the author.

This is a compelling story with so many variables that I was amazed at how well the author had fabricated it to a perfect fit. From water rights to gamble, the story was a continuous growing plot that took you on a roller coaster ride of difficulties. With no way of knowing the outcome.

The road to Delano is an apt name for this book. The road is the backbone that brought the storyline together, almost like a tapestry, as you hurried along the dirt roads with its turmoil and mystery.

When we met young Jack Duncan in his senior year, he had to quickly learn the ways of the grownups. People that had the final say in everything he touched ruled Delano. Every decision he made brought pain to others.

From a tender age, his life was influenced by these so-called leaders of the community which left him and his mother knocking at poverty’s door. Hoping to lift the financial burden he raced against time to sell a combine. In his hurry, he was dumped into a pool of mystery beginning with his father’s sudden death and had to come up with a plan to save the acre of land still in their possession.

During ongoing strikes between the farmworkers and the growers Jack tried to live a normal teenage life but was dragged down continuously. Baseball was his only way out of Delano which kept him focused on his game. A challenging task and he had to learn to make choices that could either make them winners or be tossed on the street.  

It is only fitting then to add these words to the review since it touches the core of the story.  

“When we are really honest with ourselves…only our lives… belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determine what kind of men we are…so I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!” Cesar Chavez, The Road to Delano 

“He had come with a purpose—this was his road to Delano— to suffer for others so they could learn to fight for justice. Jack must find his own way, his own path, his own fight for justice.” Cesar Chavez

Once you know your purpose all else falls into place. At times the price was high, lives taken, and decisions made; all to finish the feud. A warning though, it is a cliffhanger… I really hope to read more about Jack and Ella soon and the people that shared their lives.

The supporting characters: Ella, Adrian, Kolcinivitch, Cesar Chavez, Shirley, and Herm and a few others each played their part well to emphasize the gravity of the problems the community faced. With Jack growing up fast: from a senior to a responsible man that had to figure out the best way and to end the dispute that threatened to kill more than just jobs or valuable land. It was a race against time and higher stakes that made this a thrilling ride on a very bumpy road.

Sugar 1933

Sugar Duncan was known around Lamoille County as  a gambler who could farm, but Sugar called himself a farmer who understood a sure bet. He grew up a plowboy on a hardscrabble patch of Vermont hill country and had calluses before he knew he had brains. It was in the seventh grade, in Pete Colburn’s barn, waiting out a driving rain that he found his power. While playing seven-card stud he could see the patterns, he understood the odds. He lived by the bluff, and he lived well as far as a child of the Depression could.

Before he reached high school, they were calling him Sugar because he was sweet about taking their money.

While his college buddies baled hay and slopped pigs to pay their way through Ag school at Vermont U, Sugar found it more profitable to relieve the hooligans and rumrunners of their easy fortunes at the card table above Markham’s Grill over in Providence. After four years of playing cards and a new degree, he left town to farm where the land hadn’t been wiped clean of its strength.

Sugar rode west to California’s Central Valley in a Pullman with a new pair of tan and white brogues stuffed with cash packed in the bottom of his steamer. FDR had just signed the Cullen-Harrison Act ending Prohibition, and a fifth of whiskey was now as cheap as an acre of California farmland. He hadn’t any choice. Returning to Vermont would mean he’d starve. With gasoline a luxury, his father had resorted to using mules to plow his hundred acres. Milk and corn prices had fallen so sharply, a farmer could live better by killing his cows than by selling their milk. California was the place he could make a living. And he intended to make that living as a farmer— eventually.