Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and Us
"Freight moves like a train through a familiar internal landscape where memory and thought detour and derail and yet somehow we end up transported, we end up moved. With spare and urgent prose, Mel Bosworth has written an extraordinary novel that is at once traditional and experimental in all the best ways."
Robert Lopez, author of Asunder
"Honesty is Bosworth's helium. He spits it and we float and glow. When too many writers are hiding behind superficial structures and fondling words rather than emotions, Bosworth's tales slip like soft ash across our souls. Ash can be anything. It can be babies or bombs or helicopters or chinese stars. Ash is the cargo we carry. The freight. What we'll become when the water's burned away. And Bosworth knows how to enter like a single flame to tear out the bad. Evoking Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Freight is the kind of bed time story that big people need to hear. Something to remind us that before the bullshit hit, we could nearly be considered real."
Brian Allen Carr, author of Short Bus and Vampire Conditions
"Freight is the elegant, sensitive story of a man who carries things with him. Within him. Around him. And sometimes even above him. Freight is the story of every man. Or...EveryMan. Sometimes he discards things because the burden gets too heavy or because it sickens him, and sometimes he takes on too much. But he really doesn't discard all of anything. Bits of things remain for him to haul along. Things. You know these things well. They're life. Your life."
Alex Pruteanu, author of Short Lean Cuts
"Freight...gives everything and takes nothing. It shines brightly."
Review by Michael Davidson at The Open End
"The way Mel describes this freight is so physical, so real, so vivid that you can also begin to feel the weight, the movement, the churning of the bits and pieces of our past loves, hates, tears, and smiles. This book allows you to attempt to quantify your baggage."
Review by Jason Behrends at Orange Alert
"...Freight, a novel that reflects Bosworth's ongoing search for answers, completeness and love, and yes as always the Bosworth is love."
Ben Tanzer, author of My Father's House
"In many ways Freight runs past the general idea of what a novel is and not only breaks it down to its core (who the character is) but plays as a middle child does with ants and a magnifying glass creating wonder through destruction."
Matt DeBenedictis, founder of Safety Third Enterprises
"...subtle and delightful...fantastically innovative..."
Review in Publishers Weekly
"I loved Freight. I ate it up. Fast. I wanted to. It was easy. Such a tenderness. Such a way of looking at life in terms of carrying. Of putting down. Of throwing up. Boxcars and boxcars of everything we experience in this life trailing behind us like the heaviest of ants. Invisible, but so very there."
xTx, author of Normally Special
"...the kind of book we might've seen from Brautigan had he written a choose-your-own-adventure book and, of course, stayed sober. It's got all the inventiveness and charm of a Brautigan, but the center of it never comes apart. It's an insightful rumination on the things we carry, and how those things impact our lives."
Hosho McCreesh, author of For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed...
"...devastatingly beautiful."
Jessie Carty, author of Paper House and Fat Girl
"Freight is a soothing kind of book, one that feels very much like telling stories around a dinner table, each new narrative attempting to outdo the last while the thematic through-line holds of its own easy accord. Mel Bosworth has asked his debut novel to be more than just a book – he has asked it to be an adventure and a memoir, a collection of stories and a glossary of being, and it all works wonderfully."
J.A. Tyler, author of Inconceivable Wilson. Read full review at Monkeybicycle HERE.
"...Bosworth refuses to present a one-dimensional, doomed version of existence. His understanding is far subtler than that, more elegant. What you'll notice when you pick up Freight is that its structure is loosely based around R. A. Montgomery's Choose Your Own Adventure series. Passages are connected via gray sidebars on either side of the text, with page numbers linking certain parts of the story to other parts of the story. The idea is that you can read this book in multiple ways, in many directions. And yes, this is true. Yet, the design, as inventive as it may be, speaks more as a symbol than a narrative device. It suggests that linearity is an inadequate explanation for life. It says that the past is constantly reappearing in the present, affecting the present in both good ways and in bad, and that either outcome is mostly beyond our control. Despite its death-rattled ruminations, Freight is not a death-obsessed novel. It is a life-obsessed novel, a celebration of the stuff that fills up our lives and inevitably sinks us."
M. Thompson's review at jmww. Read the full review HERE.
"Freight may be one of the few books where there is plenty of room to bring in one’s own baggage, have a seat, and enjoy the ride."
Morowa Yejidé’s review at PANK blog. Read her full review HERE.
"Beautifully told, heartfelt and funny. Some parts go straight for the heart but never in sentimental or melodramatic way. And we can learn from its wisdom. David Hume said 'Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.' This is that story."
Martin McCaulay at Specter Literary Magazine. Read his full review HERE.
"Honestly, I think Mel Bosworth's book Freight is the best indie novel I've read this year. No matter what genre you usually read, I think this book will break even the hardest of hearts."
Pat King, author of Ghostbusters and the Rebel
"The uplifting thing about this book is that despite the narrator’s setbacks, heartbreak, loneliness, and isolation, he looks toward the future, optimistic and hungry."
Lavinia Ludlow, author of Alt.Punk. Read her full review at Small Doggies HERE.
The Lit Pub: Featured Book with write-up by Mr. Alex M. Pruteanu. Read it HERE.
"Despite the heft of the freight with which our narrator is grappling, we know that he knows what he likes and in this knowing we connect intensely, almost telepathically with our narrator and fight through the muck to rediscover, and possibly redefine home."
Seth Berg, author of Muted Lines from Someone Else's Memory. Read his full review HERE.
"...as wise as it is whimsical."
Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through the Bone
"Freight reads like vivid snapshots of feeling, sometimes snapshots of yourself. Some of them produce a strong reaction, others are like looking at photos of people you don't know. But often, in Bosworth's photo album, you recognise something in them at least, maybe humanity, and are intrigued."
Declan Tan at The Huffington Post UK. Read his full review HERE.
FREIGHT mentioned in WIRED Magazine article about E-Books and the evolution of the publishing industry. Read the article HERE.
"It is a soft, beautiful book. Even the texture of the cover hints at the clouds you’ll find inside. The book itself read more to me like a memoir perhaps, than a novel. There was no overarching narrative arc to the book beyond the arcs present in the individual chapters. What there is throughout is a constant, maintained feeling of earnestness, of searching. The story moves like memories move: blurring, doubling back, building upon one another. And Bosworth masterfully plays this up with quite possibly one my favorite formal plays I’ve seen in a book."
Christopher Newgent at VOUCHED. Read his entire review HERE.
"Mel Bosworth's Freight is in some ways a throwback, a sweet-souled, old-fashioned book wearing the armor (or maybe the Nehru jacket) of postmodernism. Bearing a dedication that the reader at first presumes must be dripping with irony, "For everyone and everything, ever," it proceeds to make that cynical reader half-believe—but half is too weak a fraction; I'm inclined to say 94.7% believe—not only in the sincerity of such a sentiment, but even in its wisdom."
Michael Griffith, author of Bibliophilia & Trophy. Read his full review in the March/April 2012 edition of American Book Review.
"I was elated by this book. I can't recall feeling so genuinely wistful as I did with Freight."
Tom Williams, author of The Mimic's Own Voice. Read Tom's complete review HERE.
