My Head Is Full of Books: Review: SO FAR GONE

Thursday, January 22, 2026

Review: SO FAR GONE

Title: So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Book Beginning/ First Line Friday quote:

A prim girl stood still as a fencepost on Rhys Kinnick's front porch. Next to her, a cowlicked boy shifted his weight from one snow boot to the other snow boot. Both kids wore backpacks. On the stairs below them, a woman held an umbrella against the pattering rain.

Friday56 quote:

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every hurricane, firestorm, melting ice cap a local disaster, the seas boiling up around them, every cynical politician and legal maneuver part of the same rotten fabric -- and half the country somehow seeing it exactly the opposite way.

Summary: Seven years after a fight with his son-in-law, which caused Rhys Kinnick to move to a cabin in the woods off the grid, his grandchildren show up on his doorstep. Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing is not exactly the type of place to raise children, but he is determined to try. He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids.

But when the militia members, from the group the father is mixed up with, show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the world (and get a cell phone.) With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind to rescue the kids and locate his daughter, their mother.

Review: My first book of 2026, Worth Fighting For, was a serious collection of essays about how Christian Naturalists are warping Christianity and what concerned folks, like me, can do about it. As I read through the essays I got more and more weighted down by the increasing realization of how bad things are in our country. By book's end I wanted to go to bed and pull a blanket over my head. Something which was meant to be helpful made me more discouraged than ever.

Next I picked up a fiction book by a favorite author, Jess Walter, called So Far Gone. Within a few pages I realized that Christian Nationalists also populated the pages of this book but every time the topic was mentioned I found myself laughing. Jess Walter has a way of making his readers laugh, rather than cry, at the absurdities of our current situations.

So Far Gone is set mainly in Eastern Washington around the city of Spokane, where Walter lives. The Christian Nationalist's compound is set in the panhandle of Northern Idaho, right across the stateline. Nearby in the NE part of the state is the Spokane Indian Reservation, where another part of the story takes place. One of the reasons I enjoy reading Jess Walter books is because he always sets them in my state, often mentioning places I've visited.

The main character, Rhys Kinnick, was a journalist writing for the Spokane newspaper focusing on environmental issues. As the newspaper downsized, Kinnick lost his job and his identity. Instead of sticking around and trying his hand at something else, he retires to a cabin in the woods built his grandfather and does little to improve it and he completely unhooks himself from technology which he views with skepticism (see quote from Friday56). Living in such isolation seemed good at first, perhaps Rhys would finally find time to write the book he has been researching for years. But the isolation grows to the point Rhys is almost a hermit, even losing touch with his only daughter and grandchildren, until that fateful day when they show up on his porch steps. Walter knows what he is writing about since he began his writing career as a journalist, writing for the Spokane-Review newspaper. In an interview about this book, Walter said being a journalist "made me more outward-looking than I would have been otherwise. Journalism allowed me to look at systems and institutions, and to now take fictional characters and put them into worlds that I covered as a reporter. So, for me, I think it really opened my eyes to what my fiction should be about." He certainly brought a journalist's eyes and skills as he crafted this story.

So Far Gone is full of dark humor which propelled the story through its darker parts. Since I've read several of Walters other books --Citizen Vince, Cold Millions, Beautiful Ruins, The Financial Lives of Poets -- I knew this about his books. I also knew that nothing terrible, terrible would likely happen. Good. What a relief. Humor without horror. There is enough "terrible, terrible" in the world right now without having to confront it on the pages of books, too. Don listened to the audiobook with me. It was narrated by Wil Patton, another favorite. Don was completely invested in the story. I think he laughed harder than I did and he clearly admired Walter's writing style. Both of us remarked how refreshing it is to read a book set in our state. (Apparently, this is theme in our family! Ha) We talked a lot about the way fiction can often have a bigger impact on readers than nonfiction, perhaps because the packaging makes the bad news more palatable -- as So Far Gone did for me compared the book of essays on a similar topic.

Here is one of the funniest quotes I remember from the book. Don and I both it was so funny, we had to rewind the audiobook to hear a few more times before we were ready to move on and then we kept repeating it to each other for the rest of the day:

“As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.”

So Far Gone has it all -- great writing; vivid settings; a mystery (where is the daughter?); quirky characters; timely satire about socio-political, religious, environmental, and technological issues; dark humor, and a unique plot. Don and I both recommend this book to you.

Don and I both rated the book -- 5 stars.