Strong Like You

Strong Like You is the debut young adult novel by Russellville (Pope County) journalist T. L. Simpson. Released on March 12, 2024, by Minnesota-based North Star Editions, the book tells the story of Walker Lauderdale, an angry, confused fifteen-year-old high school student in the fictional Arkansas Ozarks town of Samson.

As the novel begins, Walker’s volatile, drug-dealing father Hank has disappeared, and Walker and his mother are left struggling to get by. The situation is such that they are missing meals and a relative is threatening to kick them out of their home.

Hank had been a member of the high school football team, and Walker is following in his footsteps on the gridiron. Walker also has a temper, another thing he has in common with his father, and is often in trouble at school.

Walker’s football coach takes an interest in him and tries to keep him on the right path, without much success. The coach has also started up a relationship with Walker’s mother, a situation that Walker resents. What Walker wants more than anything is to have some sort of normal home life and for his father, whom he idolizes, to return. He soon sets off on a dangerous, ill-advised search for his dad that leads to a stunning revelation.

The story is told in first person, with Walker addressing his father directly. The boy’s voice and the novel’s gritty, grim tone are established in the prologue: “I haven’t cried one time since you disappeared. Not even at football practice when Paton Roper told the whole team you were probably dead.” At another point, he says: “Some folks got it soft, but I am not one of those people.”

On the advice of a concerned and generous school guidance counselor, Walker begins to write about his feelings and experiences in poems. It is something that makes him uncomfortable at first, but over time he finds solace in writing.

Strong Like You is an unflinching take on sometimes toxic forms of masculinity that explores friendships, family, betrayal, violence, and trauma. Like The Outsiders, That Was Then, This Is Now, and other books by proto young adult novelist S. E. Hinton, Simpson’s debut examines the life of a boy from an unstable, sometimes dangerous upbringing whose ideas about manhood and emotional strength are at odds with a sensitivity he possesses but does not fully understand.

Kirkus Reviews noted that “Walker’s emotional instability, the small-town setting’s poverty, and the descriptions of families in crisis all lend the tale a harsh cast overall.” The book was summarized as a “grim but not entirely hopeless picture of life in the Ozarks, threaded with tragedies both immediate and endemic.”

Simpson is the editor of the Courier newspaper in Russellville, where he started working as a reporter in 2012. His experiences covering the crime beat as well as reporting on high school sports were influential in coming up with the novel’s premise, he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

For additional information:
Clancy, Sean. “Russellville Journalist’s ‘Strong Like You’ Published.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 5, 2024, pp. 1E, 6E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/apr/04/russellville-journalists-strong-like-you-published/ (accessed September 13, 2024).

Review of Strong Like You. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tl-simpson/strong-like-you/ (accessed September 13, 2024).

Simpson, T. L. Strong Like You. Mendota Heights, MN: North Star Editions, 2024.

Sean Clancy
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette