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Waffles Reviews, The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

Waffles Reviews, The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith is a phenomenal mix of rural noir and sports drama.

The Protagonist is a man named Jack Boucher, means Butcher in french.

Boucher is a broken down illegal bare knuckle prizefighter.

I don't mean he is Rocky from the last Rocky broken, I mean actually broken. Decades of making a living in illegal prizefights have left him in constant pain from old wounds of which he turns to illegal pain pills to keep him stable, he takes uppers before a fight and the worst of all is all those years in backroom prizefights in the deep south have left him with headaches and problems with his memory, he can't even remember who is is friend or his enemy so he made himself a list that he keeps on him.

In all this he finally gets enough to pay off Big Momma Sweet, the queen of Mississippi Delta vice. Unfortunately he is robbed of the money and has no way to pay it back.

The book starts off showing how bad of a childhood he had until he was 12 when his parents, whose name he doesn't know drop him off when he was 2 at a salvation army with only a diaper that needed to be changed hours ago and a t shirt for his clothes.

He passes through foster care till finally he meets a woman named Maryann.

Maryann is the woman who saved him or at least tried and who he considers his mother and she lays dying in a nursing home with dementia while the back is about to foreclose on her family property that she gave to Jack.

There is a girl that Jack meets named Annette who is the key to Jack's Redemption when it turns out that he may be his daughter.

Waffles Reviews, The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

In the end Jack has to Fight one more time. One more timeso Maryann can have someone by her side while she dies, one more time for the debt to Big Momma Sweet to be cleared, and one more time to keep the house.

In this book you see Jack's first fight, he was a child and it was a schoolyard

You see his 1st fight for money when he was 17

And you see his last fight for redemption to make things right when they went so wrong.

It was a beautiful and moving book the absolute pinnacle of what Rural Noir can be. Its the story of a Fighter, of a man who was beaten down by life but always got back up.

Waffles Reviews, The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith
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