Humpty Dumpty
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Harold Rogers
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By:
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Harold Rogers
A high school quarterback and his family are embroiled in an abhorrent crime and its cover-up—a bold new novel that confronts American hero-worship and its irreversible consequences.
This program is read by the author.
HUMPTY-DUMPTY SAT ON A WALL . . .
Darius Rodgers is the king of Steubenville, Ohio. Invincible, untouchable: a god among men. He’s the quarterback about to lead his team to their first state championship in twenty years. And now his mom and his twin sister, Beatriz and Anna, are back from exile in Rio, trying to sew the estranged family back together. Nothing can spoil his glory: Not love. Not loyalty. Nothing. Until he ushers in his own doom.
HUMPTY-DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL . . .
Anna doesn’t even want to be back in Stupidville, but she decides to make the most of it. She’s here to live free and have fun! But her secret romance with Darius’s best friend, Fleet, and the rumors it spawns make the first domino fall in a series of social detonations in one small town’s moral apocalypse: crime, conspiracy, silence, betrayal, hackers, incels, dereliction!
How the hell do you tell a story like this?
Hilarious, bold, and explosively original, Harold Rogers’s Humpty Dumpty is a reckoning with American rot, generational failure, and the brutal question at the heart of every tragedy: Why didn’t you do anything?
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Critics' reviews
"Rogers’ linguistic prowess and creative talents are on full display here. . . A literary tour-de-force, and a noir masterpiece."
–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
"[A] ferocious, darkly comedic reckoning with the mythologies of small-town America . . . Rogers is less interested in the crime than in the ecosystem that permits it--the silence, complicity, tribal loyalty, and moral evasions with which communities protect their idols. Rather than a standard morality play, Rogers crafts a chaotic portrait of systemic rot, asking a brutal question about collective willful ignorance when a community builds its pride on a fragile pedestal. . . By weaving razor-sharp social commentary into a polyphonic narrative, Rogers captures the absurdity and tragedy of modern hero worshop. An utterly compelling, sharply unsettling examination of how Americans manufacture heroes and then protect the mythology at almost any cost."
—Booklist (starred review)
"A devilish tale of sports hero worship and toxic masculinity . . . Rogers employs partially redacted journal entries, photos, and interview transcripts, all to immersive effect . . . [Humpty Dumpty] offers an apt reminder that every action as a consequence."
—Publishers Weekly
"A high school apocalypse . . . Exuberant . . . [Humpty Dumpty] has a raucous, infectious energy and wit that keep the pages turning. Hyperkinetic and darkly comic, Rogers’ novel offers a fresh take on a well-worn tale of male teen hubris."
—Kirkus Reviews