Spring, 1981. Langfordville.Jimmy Rogers is seventeen, a late bloomer who didn’t learn to read until the sixth grade, and a boy nobody in town bothers to listen to. His father, Red, is a gifted machinist and the best joke teller in the county, and for twenty-four years he has been drowning one memory in a bottle: the morning in 1957 when his own father died and the whole town decided it was Red’s fault.Then Jimmy hears a song in his head that he can’t stop playing.His cousin Perkie pulls him into The Rhythm Kings, the loud, young, terrible-and-getting-better band that practices in the basement of Professor Remembers Roadhouse & Bakery Café. For a few bright weeks there is Fifties Night, a girl named Maria, the stock-car race at Pine Notch, and the first sound of a crowd singing Jimmy’s words back to him.Then a party ends in tragedy. Two of Jimmy’s friends are dead, the factory burns, and Langfordville is sure it knows who to blame. Again.Torn between his father’s despair and his mother’s faith, Jimmy has to choose which voice he will follow before grief carries him over the railing of Langford Bridge, and before the truth about what happened to Perkie and Cathy is buried with them. Help comes from the people the town overlooked. One is Jediah Hudson, the high school janitor who served twenty-four years for a crime he didn’t commit. Another is the Professor, the roadhouse owner who has spent forty-five years piecing this story together.Inspired by true events from the author’s own family, Can’t Stop It! is a story of fathers and sons and a woman who loves them both, music and grief, guilt and forgiveness, and the one thing that keeps playing after everything else stops.The opening novel of The Jimmy Rogers Chronicles, followed by It’s Impossible, Forgiveness: A Trilogy and The Price of Yes. Read more
