I loved this book.  It made me laugh.  It made me cry.  I wanted to throw my arms around that hard-headed little military brat searching for roots in her rootless world.  In the end, she realizes what every survivor eventually does–no one is going to save you, you have to do it yourself.

In her debut novel, Squires, having grown up in a military family, provides an inside look at the life of an army brat. Teenaged Lucinda Collins lives on an army base in Germany in the post-Vietnam era. Her parents entered into a hasty marriage, and the ongoing strife of military life has eroded their fragile bond. Lucinda loves her father, but she detests the way he neglects his family. At school, all of the kids are constantly in transition; Lucinda meets a boy, Sydney, and falls in love within a few hours, but his family moves away three days later. Unable to form lasting ties, she discovers that rock ’n’ roll provides her with a context that can be transported anywhere. Though her family eventually splinters, her emotional toughness serves her well as she moves into adulthood. VERDICT A unique, compelling perspective on the dynamics of a military family, springing from the experience of someone who has been there.

“Smart, funny, and beautifully written, Constance Squires’ wonderful first novel Along the Watchtower chronicles the untethered life of army brat Lucinda Collins and her on-the-brink military family. With muscular prose and richly observed detail, Squires recreates the era between two wars in an American military haunted by Vietnam, based in a resurgent Germany haunted by World War II.  Lucinda’s sassy, sometimes aching, always observant sensibility cuts to the heart of this rocketing, ricocheting, rollercoaster-ride discovery of self, the powerful forces that rock music holds, and the truth about where ‘home’ lies.  It’s a gripping, magical, swiftly compelling read. You’re going to love this book.”

“Set in 1980s West Germany and Lawton, Oklahoma, Constance Squires’s compelling debut novel takes both ghost story and soldier’s story and remyths these into a unique and fascinating hybrid.  With unforgettable characters and a well-crafted plot, Along the Watchtower puts the screws to the reader and turns them tighter and tighter.  Beautiful, brilliant, terrifying.”

“Constance Squires’ Along the Watchtower is an often-poignant rite-de-passage story of a daughter growing up in an Army family. Beginning on a military base in Germany in the early 1980s, Lucinda’s peripatetic tale closes during the Desert Storm era, in Oklahoma, where the family–splintered over time–is in a sense restored. Lucinda’s trajectory is accented with music and with acts of derring-do, but is also rife with ghosts and lost souls.”

“…a debut novel that deftly uses fiction to tell an engaging tale of transient youth that no doubt is very close to her own…[Squires’s] tough heroine is likable and the epiphanies that bring Lucinda into adulthood…are satisfyingly real.”