House of Good Hope is just a beautiful book, filled with the poignant bittersweet of hope and loss. Michael Downs writes about friendship. He writes about the promises we try to keep. He writes about poverty and despair. The subjects are agonizing, but they shine with the poetic clarity of Downs's prose.''Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights and A Prayer for the City
'A huge story hiding in plain sight, House of Good Hope recounts Hartford's losses with a clear-eyed intimacy. Through the lives of five inner-city kids striving to be responsible men, Michael Downs asks what allegiance America owes its failing cities and what we all, as individuals, owe the places we call home.''Stewart O'Nan, author of Everyday People
'With poignant story-telling, descriptive prose, and compelling neighborhood characters, Michael Downs captures the heartbeat of Connecticut's multi-cultural and poverty-riddled capital city. Downs is obviously a guy who loves his hometown'warts and all'and is enamored of its past, its shortcomings, and its potential.''Stan Simpson, columnist for the Hartford Courant and radio talk show host for WTIC NewsTalk
It was a crumbling city, like so many others. But in Hartford five gifted young men, who met as high school athletes, promised their lives to the hometown that shaped them even as it was coming apart. They intended to go far. They would, they pledged, bring back college degrees and commit themselves to living and working in Hartford. This is the story of those five men and how they kept, or broke, that promise'told by a writer whose own family history and departure are also part of Hartford's struggle. It is a story of hope and heartbreak; love, sacrifice, and murder; big-time college football and police brutality; a drug sting that fells a high school coach; and, finally, a reunion of friends who have learned how hard it is to honor the past and live for the future in a place like Hartford
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