“He nudged his chair close and studied the warm little hand. He smelled of sweat, peppermint, tobacco, old coffee. Despite his accent he wasn’t hard to understand – he talked so slowly and so carefully. She would have a long life, he said. She would have one child… You have special talents, he told her. People don’t realize.” 

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  DEC 15, 2011)

… stated the “tiny old man,” one of the many transient visitors to the Hardy farm in the small village of Willow Bend while reading eight-year-old Norma Joyce’s palm.

Canadian author, Elizabeth Hay, centers her superb, enchanting and deeply moving novel around Norma Joyce and sister Lucinda, her senior by nine years. Set against the beautifully evoked natural environments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and spanning over more than thirty years, the author explores in sometimes subtle, sometimes defter, ways the sisters’ dissimilar characters. One is an “ugly duckling,” the other a beauty; one is rebellious and lazy, the other kind, efficient and unassuming… In a way, their characters mirror what are also suggested to be traditional features of inhabitants living with and in these two contrasting landscapes: on the one hand the farmers in Saskatchewan, patient and often fatalistic in their exposure to the vagaries of the weather and the hopes and destructions that those can bring, on the other the Ontarians, assumed to have a much easier life and, to top it off: they grow apples… A rare delicacy for the farmers out west. Hay wonderfully integrates the theme of the apple – the symbol of seduction as well as health!

Hay’s novel is as much an engaging portrait of the quirky Norma Joyce as it is a delicately woven family drama, beginning in the harsh “dustbowl” years of the 1930s. Still, Hay gives us much more than that: her exquisite writing shines when she paints in richly modulated prose, rather than with the brush, a deeply felt love poem to nature: its constantly varying beauty in response to a weather that seem to toy with it as in a never-ending dance.

While Lucinda runs the household on the farm with efficiency and dedication under the admiring eye of their widowed father, Norma Joyce succeeds in daily disappearing acts to avoid taking her place as a dutiful daughter. Into their routine lives enters, one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Maurice Dove, attractive, knowledgeable and entertaining, a student of weather patterns, Prairie grasses and much more… Ontario meets Saskatchewan with unforeseeable consequences…

Norma Joyce has always been a child of nature through and through: “She had her own memory of grasses. Five years old and lying on her back in the long grass behind the barn, the June sun beating down from a cloudless sky until warmth of another kind pulsed through her in waves [...] she remembers every name of every plant.” Now, at eight, she has found in Maurice the ideal teacher and she turns into the “perfect student.” Her small hand reaches out to claim him… He, while enchanted with Lucinda, had been “taken aback by [Norma Joyce's] ugliness, a word he modified to homeliness the next morning [...] then at breakfast he thought her merely strange, and now, interesting.”

Hay is too fine and imaginative a writer to let the story develop predictably. There will be many twists and turns with the family moving to Ottawa and Norma Joyce even further away to New York. At every turn, Hay builds an environment in which human beings interact with the natural surroundings they are placed into. Her description of the Ottawa neighbourhood is intimate and real; New York has its own attractions and disappointments. As Norma Joyce grows up, she feels forced into a difficult journey, that, she later realizes has been an essential phase for her to gain confidence in herself and to discover “her special talents” as the old man had predicted: “Her life would stop, then it would start again…”.

As a reader, I was totally engaged with Hay’s exploration of Norma Joyce’s maturing that teaches her, among many other lessons, to let go while allowing herself to also accept new experiences into her life. Her life-long connection to the prairies sustains her at a deep level, her community in Ottawa helps her to find new avenues to her inner soul. At a different level, Hay plays with references to Thomas Hardy, to established naturalists to underline the importance of landscape and our traditional connection to it. She evokes images that remind us of fairy tales, such as the drop of bright red blood on the white pillow or Norma’s ability to pre-sense events happening many miles away. For me they form part of a richly created background to what is a very authentic and meaningful account of one young woman’s road to herself, an extraordinary achievement for a first novel. A Student of Weather collected several awards and, deservedly, was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2000.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Counterpoint (January 2, 2002)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Late Nights on Air Garbo Laughs

Bibliography:

• Crossing the Snow Line: Stories (1989)
• Small Change: Stories (1997)
• A Student of Weather (2000; 2001 in the US)
• Garbo Laughs (2003)
• Late Nights on Air (2007; 2008 in the US)
• Alone in the Classroom (2011 in Canada)

Non-Fiction:

• The Only Snow in Havana (1992)
• Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (1993)

“I acknowledged his presence only by reaching out to grasp what he had brought me, keeping my eyes on the ground. When I was safely around a corner, out of view, I looked into my hand.

Oval, gray-green leaves grew from a tangle of lime-colored twigs, translucent balls clinging to the branches like drops of rain. The clipping fit exactly into the ball of my hand, and the soft leaves stung where they touched.

Mistletoe.

‘I surmount all obstacles’.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  AUG 23, 2011)

Before she is emancipated at eighteen years old, Victoria Jones has lived in 32 different foster homes creating havoc wherever she’s lived. Abandoned at birth by a mother she never knew and knows nothing about, the only steady contact she’s had in her life is Meredith, her social worker. Meredith’s role is primarily to take Victoria from one foster home and place her in another.

The novel goes back and forth in time, exploring Victoria’s childhood years and comparing them with her current life. The reader learns of the one real and significant relationship that Victoria had as a child – her relationship with Elizabeth who wanted to adopt her when she was ten. It is through Elizabeth that Victoria learns the Elizabethan language of flowers, each flower signifying an emotion or feeling. Victoria’s time with Elizabeth started out very rocky and during the sixteen months she spent there, she grew to love Elizabeth. A tragedy prevents the adoption from taking place.

Once emancipated from her final group home at eighteen years old, Victoria has no place to live. She makes herself a shelter in Delores Park in San Francisco. There she plants a garden with flowers that she tends with love. She observes a florist, Renata, who own a store called Blooms and approaches her with a request for work. At first, Victoria works one day a week helping Renata at the wholesale flower market on Sundays. Her work time increases and she is able to rent a very small apartment on the money she earns.

At the flower market, Victoria meets a man who she is attracted to. This is a miracle for her as she hates to be touched – physically or psychically. This man, Grant, corresponds with her by the language of flowers, sending her notes that have particular meaning in the floral tongue. Victoria responds to this but is terrified of intimacy or attachment of any type.

Her knowledge of flowers and their meanings is so complete that Renata’s customers go to Victoria and ask her to make special bouquets for goals in their lives – pure love (dianthus), purity of heart (water lily), warmth of feeling (peppermint), and courage (protea). These are just a few of the dreams, hopes, and aspirations that Victoria’s clients ask her to share with them in her flower arrangements. Renata, as Victoria’s mentor, watches happily as Victoria begins to come into herself.

I found myself smelling the flowers as I read the book. It was like an experience in synesthesia. Sometimes I smelled roses, then peppermint, then cherry blossoms. I was mesmerized by the book and the flower metaphors that prevailed. I loved the way The Language of Flowers showed how Victoria was able to escape her locked in world of fear, to reach out in a way that only someone else well-versed in her floral knowledge could respond to. When Grant and Victoria start a correspondence with flowers, the reader can’t help but root for them to overcome all the many obstacles in their paths.

This is a book filled with pain and anguish, ameliorated to some extent by the beauty of floral language that the protagonist is well-versed in. Without this language, she would be alone, cut off from everyone and without a way to communicate. It’s her own personal way of signing as she is deaf to the true meaning of the spoken word. Her life of group home after group home has dulled her senses, scared her out of trying intimacy and prevented her from normal attachment.

Victoria is a lonely soul whose growth and connections are beautifully portrayed in this book. This is a debut novel by the author, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, who attributes her inspiration for writing it in part from her experience as a foster mother. Diffenbaugh has a natural affinity for words and I hope that this is the beginning of a long and fruitful writing career.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books; First Edition (August 23, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Vanessa Diffenbaugh
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Night Garden by Pamela Holm Bloodroot by Amy Greene

Bibliography:

• The Language of Flowers (August 2011)

“Even though he was exhausted and stabs of pain pulsed through his ear, Cody refused to take the medication they’d given him because he knew, he just knew, that if he let his defenses down even a little he’d start drinking. He knew himself. He’d find a justification to start off on another bender. His ear hurt; He was suspended; Precious hours for finding the killer had been wasted and he’d never get them back; His dog had died (granted, it was twenty years before, but it was still dead; He missed his son; His 401(k) wasn’t worth crap anymore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  AUG 20, 2011) Back of Beyond by C. J. Box is just what a mystery thriller should be – a wild ride through twists and turns with rogue characters that have depth of spirit and lots of baggage. This book is a hardcore page-turner with characters the reader gets to know well. It’s well-plotted and everything comes together just when it’s supposed to; no red herrings and no deus ex machina. Box knows exactly how to plot his book so that each page brings the reader closer to crisis and then conclusion. There is the dark side that is required in order for good to prevail and there are lots of cold, dark pathways that wind their way to a fine conclusion. Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop with a history of alcoholism and wild behavior. If he doesn’t like a suspect he will shoot him in the knee to get a confession. He’s been kicked out of the Denver police force and finds himself back in Helena, Montana where his people hail from. As he self-describes his family, they’re “white trash.” The only good thing to his credit is his son Justin, who has turned out to be a good kid raised primarily by his ex-wife, Jenny. As the book opens, Cody has been on the wagon for 59 days and is participating in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). His AA sponsor, Hank, is a man Cody trusts and who has guided him to his tentative sobriety. Cody finds out that Hank’s cabin has been destroyed by fire and that Hank has been killed. It appears, at first, to be a suicide but after careful investigation, Cody realizes it’s a homicide. He knows Hank and he knows that Hank would never take his life. He also realizes that Hank’s AA coins are missing and Hank never kept these coins far from his person. Whoever killed Hank stole the coins and made the scene look like a suicide. The only person who believes Cody is his partner, Larry. The clues that Cody finds lead him to an outfitter called Wilderness Adventures run by one Jed McCarthy. Jed is a narcissistic self-promoter who is about to start his longest trip of the season into Yellowstone Park. He calls this trip “Back of Beyond” because it goes so deep into the National Park. Unfortunately, Cody finds out that his son, Justin, along with Jenny’s fiancé, are on this trip. He tries to get to Yellowstone in time to prevent the trip from starting but doesn’t make it. Meanwhile, Cody gets suspended from the Helena police force and must make the trip alone as a civilian. He realizes that he’s being followed and stalked and that his very life is in danger. As he gets closer to the park, there is an attempt on his life. Cody becomes paranoid and doesn’t know who to trust. Could his partner Larry be his nemesis? The book has a lot of good information on alcoholism and recovery, both the disease, the confidentiality and the rehabilitation process. It shows Cody’s constant efforts to remain sober along with his slips. It also shows him picking himself up again to get on the wagon. I was impressed by how much Box knows about AA and the program. The reader can’t help but notice the author’s love and respect for the wilderness. His descriptions of Yellowstone and its geologic formations are breathtaking. We get to see Wyoming and Montana from the eyes of a writer who loves the spaces of the great outdoors. Back of Beyondis hard to put down. It’s one of those thrillers where each page adds new information and each of the characters are interesting. The book comprises the best of both worlds – it is character and action driven. It may be a bit formulaic but it’s a great formula, one that keeps the reader on his toes and coming back for more.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 83 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; First Edition (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	C.J. Box
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Cold Wind

Bibliography:

Joe Pickett Series:

• Open Season (2001)
• Savage Run (2002)
• Winterkill (2003)
• Trophy Hunt (2004)
• Out of Range (2005)
• In Plain Sight (2006)
• Free Fire (2007)
• Blood Trail (2008)
• Below Zero (2009)
• Nowhere to Run (2010)
• Cold Wind (2011)
• Force of Nature (March 2012)

Stand-alone:

• Blue Heaven (2008) /  / / 
• Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (2009)
• Back of Beyond (August 2011)

“The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 27, 2011)

I can honestly say that I have not read a book so evocative of place and time since reading anything by Faulkner.

“Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.”

See what I mean?

Tinkers picks up eight days before George Washington Crosby, a New England patriarch, expires. He is lying on a hospital bed in his living room, “right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.” He is surrounded by the antique clocks he collected and repaired, each tick-tock a motion closer to oblivion. His family, like his consciousness, comes and goes. He built the house in which he now rests. “The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment the floor was going to give.” As he dies, the house and room dissolve, family members disappear. His fragile consciousness returns him to the hardscrabble existence of his upbringing in New England.

George’s father, Howard, was a tinker and traveling salesman. He plied his trade in the backwoods of Maine. He had a hard life. He was epileptic. Upon learning that his cold-hearted wife is going to have him institutionalized, he abandons his family, leaving George and his siblings. “His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and make him into something better.” The event–the abandonment–haunts and plagues George to his last breath. “…personal mysteries,” he thinks, “like where is my father, why can’t I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn’t stop; it simply ends.”

A good reviewer worth his or her salt, would not, should not, pad a review with so much lifting of prose, so many passages directly rendered. But I cannot help myself. The writing in this compact little book is so taut it hums like a drawn bowstring. The reader wonders, how such tension can so artfully be sustained? But sustained it remains, each paragraph more precisely constructed than the previous one.

Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel. The publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, had only been in business a couple of years when they brought it to market. The New York Times did not review the book, it being so far off the radar. (“Every now and then a good book completely passes us by,” Gregory Cowles wrote in the Arts section, a full year after publication.) It won the Pulitzer. Deservedly so. At a time when a thinking person might despair over the crassness and commercialization of, well, of virtually everything that matters, one finds hope and its reward in the tale of such talent realized. Indeed, all is not lost.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 227 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Harding
EXTRAS:	ExcerptUWIRE interview with Paul Harding
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Pulitzer Prize winners:Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• Tinkers (January 2009)

“How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I’ll be civil when the killing’s done and not a minute before.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 23, 2011)

Never one to shy away from sacred cow territory or the ruthless ways in which humans stampede it, T.C. Boyle’s latest wise epic puts ecologists on a restless collision course with agitated animal rights activists. In his vintage style of tackling issues with snarling drama and incendiary humor, Boyle plots a political novel without sending the reader a preachy message, although he comes right up under it.

Boyle turns eco controversy on its head, turning back to the theme that man’s desire to keep a clean footprint on the earth is a messy and dirty job, often with dire consequences. This is Boyle; bully pulpits are bent with irony, and righteousness is fraught with disobedience. Endangerment of the species brings on reckless endangerment of lives. Who has the right to dominate, to possess this planet? Humans, creatures, natural inhabitants, invasive species–several are examined, many left wanting–especially humans.

Restoration ecologist/ biologist and PhD Alma Boyd Takesue spearheads a program with the National Parks Service to exterminate invasive species on the Channel Islands of California. She argues that the infestation of rats and feral pigs are killing off the endemic Channel Island Foxes and disrupting the natural ecosystem.

Her dreadlocked redheaded nemesis, businessman Dave LaJoy, knows all about disruption. He protests every one of Alma’s presentations to declare war on her efforts, and is opposed to the idea that extirpation leads to preservation. No public presentation by Alma is without LaJoy’s outcry.

LaJoy is the contentious head of FPA (For the Protection of Animals), a small organization viewed by ecologists as fanatical. His folksinger girlfriend, Anise Reed, is at his side on this issue, contrary to–or a result of–her childhood on a sheep farm on one of the Northern Channel Islands, Santa Cruz, which ended with a bloodlust tragedy.

Alma has the law of the federal government, if not always nature, on her side, as well as her Park Service employee boyfriend, Tim Sickafoose. LaJoy is the underdog, dependent on citizen donations and ruled by his unbridled rage. He is primed to fight with subversive acts designed to undermine Alma’s program. No ecologists will keep LaJoy from his battle to save the animals. Boyle, in his typical rogue tenor, demonstrates that both sides of the fence are imbued with truth and riddled with internal contradictions.

Boyle shifts time periods to illustrate the recent history of the islands and dramatize the inextricable links between past and present, from the introduction of non-native species, to the family connections of Alma and Anise. Alma’s grandmother survived a shipwreck near Anacapa while she was pregnant with Alma’s mother. Boyle’s portrayal of this disaster was stunning, a pinpoint event of woman overcoming the storm of nature’s catastrophes with some tragic and triumphant results.

Years later, on Santa Cruz Island, Anise’s mother suffered a chilling invasion of corporate corruption and a hideous attack on the sheep farm where she lived and toiled. She had worked hard to keep the hungry ravens from the ewes, their carrion cries now reverberating through the years.

The historical segments were superbly vivid and requisite to the central story, but interspersed throughout were florid narrative ambushes and excursions that slowed the central movement to a crawl. The cadence was generally barky and rough, as choppy as the Channel Island waters, as emphatic and forceful as a winter storm. I never felt that Boyd hit a rhythmic stride; it was loud and strident, with a manic refrain. But there were jewel-cut, Boyle-cut passages within that often lifted off and flew from the turgid overflow.

Although he dodged from sermonizing, it periodically read like an almanac or lecture. His voice tapped in the background, then ceded to the ripe moments of story. It was page-turning terror until the advent of excess fluctuations, like waves crashing against the wily outcroppings of jagged rock. The symmetry was lost at sea, and the climax was drowned in the fury.

However, despite these complaints, I was mentally fastened and stimulated, although the emotional resonance faded by the last hundred pages. It’s a visionary story, but it lacks visual constancy except for some eye-popping flourishes.

Also, some of the characters drift off or stagnate, or are trammeled by the themes. It was their “purpose” that overrode their other characteristics. There was something missing emotionally, and I lost interest in them as individuals. But, alas, their absolute certainties are left for the reader to ponder. I am tempted to just say: Boyle was being Boyle, only more so. He is one-of-a-kind, an island of Boyle, and who am I to cross it?

The inclusion of pigs, whether capitalist or feral; the onslaught of rats, both animal and human; a nest of snakes, poisonous or colloquial; and the carrion birds circling the sky are just a few of the metaphorical joists that furnish the narrative and add dimension to the interlocking sequences. As a conservation story, the prose isn’t too thrifty, but in the end, you will be glad you read it. I hesitate to say it is significant, but there you go. Boyle is a rare species. It is topical and arch, Boyle and boiling, trenchant and tough.

End note—there’s an intrepid video trailer of this book, directed by Jamieson Fry. It rocks!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 58 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (February 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	T.C. Boyle
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide andExcerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Drop City The Inner Circle Tooth and Claw: Other Stories Talk Talk The Women

Bibliography:

• Descent of Man (1979)
• Water Music (1982)
• Budding Prospects (1984)
• Greasy Lake and Other Stories (1985)
• World’s End (1987)
• If the River Was Whiskey: Stories (1989)
• East Is East (1990)
• The Road to Wellville (1993)
• Without A Hero and Other Stories (1994)
• The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
• Riven Rock (1998)
• T.C. Boyle Stories (1998)
• A Friend of the Earth (2000)
• After the Plague (2001)
• Drop City (2003)
• The Inner Circle (2004)
• Tooth and Claw and Other Stories (2005)
• Talk Talk (2006)
• The Women (2009)
• Wild Child and Other Stories (2010)
• When the Killing’s Done (2011)
• San Miguel (September 2012)

Young Adult:

• The Human Fly and Other Stories (2005)

“We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 16, 2011)

Visit the website for the National Park Service and you will find that the Elwha River Restoration project is a key one for the Olympic National Park in Washington state. “Elwha River Restoration will restore the river to its natural free-flowing state, allowing all five species of Pacific salmon and other anadromous fish to once again reach habitat and spawning grounds,” the project literature explains.

It is with this kernel of truth that writer Jonathan Evison spins a grand tale in his new novel, West of Here. The novel essentially looks at environmental decisions made during the late 1800s, when the American frontier moved rapidly west, and land grabs were in full swing—and the consequences of those same decisions more than a hundred years on.

Arguably the central protagonist in the novel—one populated by dozens of characters—is Ethan Thornburgh who envisions a dam across the mighty Elwha to harness its energy. “We’ll transform this place, for a hundred miles in every direction. Our dam will be a force of nature.” Thornburgh predicts.

In a twisted way, Thornburgh’s prediction comes true—the dam certainly “transforms” Port Bonita, the fictional town on the river’s banks, but not in the way that Thornburgh intended.

Fast forward to 2006, and Port Bonitans are struggling. Fishing, once a thriving business in town, is no longer a viable industry—the dam has seen to that. The town’s commercial fish processing plants serially shut down and only one lonely one is left to go on. Nevertheless Port Bonitans remain hopeful as they celebrate their heritage and look forward to the dam becoming a thing of the past soon. A poster around town perhaps says it best:

“Dam Days, September 2-3
Come celebrate over 100 years of Port Bonita history!
Featuring Live Music, Logging Competition, Chainsaw Carving Contest, and World-Famous Salmon Bake
Proudly presented in part by your neighbors at Wal-Mart.

It is at this “Dam Days” event that Jared Thornburgh, the manager of the fish processing plant, is expected to give the keynote speech. Jared, a descendant of the ambitious Ethan Thornburgh, has none of his predecessor’s fire. Instead his life is in mid-life stasis, consumed wholly by everyday trivialities. Forever bogged down by the weight of history, Jared worries he never quite measures up to the family name. “He forever lived in the shadow of this obsolete dam, his fortune linked inextricably to its hulking existence, its legacy of ecological menace,” Evison writes.

The novel moves back and forth between two times—the relatively recent present set in 2006 and the past set in 1890. A whole assorted set of characters populates each time period. Evison tries hard—sometimes too hard—to create characters in 2006 that are analogous to ones in the past. So it is that there’s an ex-convict Timmon Tillman who traces the same treacherous path along the Olympic National Park, that James Mather, an adventurous pioneer once did.

Native Americans, especially members of the Klallam tribe, also populate these pages as they too try to adapt to a changing landscape.

Evison traverses a lot of ground in this hefty novel and given its length it is remarkably well edited. The problem with West of Here is that it ultimately can’t move beyond its cast of characters to look at the wider picture and explore complexities. Evison loses the forest for the trees. As the book winds down, the “happily ever after” ending seems pat especially given the interesting complexities each of the characters started out with. It’s almost as if Evison finally ran out of steam and decided to wrap it all up with a neat bow. Notwithstanding this, West of Here truly transports the reader and lovers of a meaty story will really take to the novel.

In his “Dam Days” address, Jared Thornburgh echoes the words of his predecessor when he describes Port Bonita as “not an address, after all, not even a place, but a spirit, an essence, a pulse—a future still unfolding.”   For all the pep talk, Jared Thornburgh might be papering over the truth. After all, one might wonder, what kind of future does it portend when the only two times that someone from Port Bonita actually managed a modicum of success, was when each broke free?

As the residents of Port Bonita learn, some essential truths remain unchanged over centuries. “Can we really be whoever we want to be, now that we’ve collected all that we are?” asks one of the characters in the novel. The answer to that essential question is “Maybe.” Which, as it turns out, is still the same answer in 2006 as it was in 1890. Nevertheless, that answer carries with it some measure of hope—and that just might be enough for the hearty Port Bonitans.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 92 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (February 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jonathan Evison
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels set in the Pacific Northwest: The Wilding by Benjamin Percy The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

Bibliography:

• All About Lulu (2008)
• West Of Here (2011)
• The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (August 2012)

“In the beginning, Irene thought. There is no such thing as a beginning.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 18, 2010)

This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann’s Caribou Island. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. Like Shreve, his characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves that beat each other down. The topography and remoteness of this “exclave” state, a place non-contiguous physically with its legal attachment (of the US) serves as one of many metaphors to the attachments exemplified in this story.

Virginia Woolf, while attempting to write the life story of artist Roger Fry, observed: ”A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.” Although this is a novel, not a biography, Vann’s characters are desperately attempting to grasp, hide and reinvent themselves, trying to fill impossible voids, reconcile the past. The author explores the links between memory and myth, the gray area between real and idea, the notion of identity, and the truth of self-deception. There is stoic Irene, haunted by a childhood of abandonment; her cruel, mulish, and spineless husband, Gary; their (often) oblivious daughter, Rhoda; and Rhoda’s puerile and feckless fiancé, Jim. Minor characters (such as their taciturn, alienated son, Mark) move through the novel and accelerate the anxiety and self-destruction of this quartet of refractory souls. They unconsciously use their mates to mirror and shadow what is desired, lost, forgotten, or never was. Vann creates a circle of repetition and insularity in a vast expanse of territory, a terror of the self at its most heinous and human.

“…if they could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years ago to fit closer together, maybe they’d have a sense of something solid.”

Gary is insisting on building a log cabin in the isolated Caribou Island, pulling Irene into this last-ditch retirement dream, rife with poor planning and ripe with the unspoken threat of finally leaving her. Thirty years ago he brought her to Alaska from Berkeley, another time that he tried to create an idyllic life from an idea, and failed.

“The momentum of who she had become with Gary, the momentum of who she had become in Alaska, the momentum that made it somehow impossible to just stop right now and go back to the house. How had that happened?”

“Gary was a champion at regret…Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”

Thirty-year-old Rhoda is devoted to Jim, (who is a decade older), in an almost frantic state to get married to a man who doesn’t really love her, on the precipice of repeating her mother’s mistake. Meanwhile, Jim is on a quest to redefine himself, to combine two opposing lifestyles.

Vann does a spectacular job of engaging the reader gradually into this blistered turmoil of dissolution. The climax was compelling, creating a circle, a literary architecture of repetition. However, as penetrating and irresistible as this form was, I had a problem with the outcome. I felt that he sacrificed authenticity for symmetry. I cannot go further without giving spoilers.

Despite my vexation with the ending’s credibility, I was gripped by the power of this atmospheric story, the characters, the exquisite pacing, and the infinite amount of quotable passages. It took me a long time to remove myself from this moody, nuanced tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 76 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (January 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Vann
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Legend of a Suicide Another review of Caribou Island Also, see our review of a T.C. Boyle novel: Drop City

Bibliography:

• Legends of a Suicide: Stories (2010)
• Caribou Island (2011)
• Dirt (2012)
• Goat Mountain (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea (2005)

“What Gary wanted was the imagined village, the return to an idyllic time when he could have a role, a set task, as blacksmith or baker or singer of a people’s stories. That’s who he really wanted to be, the “shaper,”  the singer of a people’s history, which would be one and the same. What Irene wanted was only to never be alone again, passed around, unwanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 18, 2010)

Many people think of Alaska as wildness with great open spaces in a mountainous wildernous with sub-arctic cold, dark and long winters, ever-light summers, bears and moose. This is not the Alaska of David Vann. His Alaska consists of what sounds like an area most likely the Tongass National Rain Forest. This is the northernmost rainforest on earth, and it extends into southeast Alaska. Trees here are huge but grow close together here much like in the Amazon. It rains up to 400 inches a year in this part of Alaska and the days are often dark and dismal with damp that cuts right through you. There is no vista in this forest; all you have are the trees that hem you in.

It is in this Alaska that Gary and Irene realize that their marriage is falling apart, that they go through the motions of one last try at redeeming their moribund marriage. They decide to build a cabin on Caribou Island, a place both isolated and isolating. Gary has no coherent plans and their cabin ends up as a bunch of sticks stuck together every which way with huge gaps everywhere. The elements are not kept out and the rain, snow and wind wails through the cabin even as the last nail is hammered crookedly in.

Irene blames Gary for her life, for not having fulfilled what she might have been without him, and Gary blames Irene for his life’s failures as well. Once he was a promising dissertation student at University of California Berkeley. Now he goes from ill-conceived project to ill-conceived project, each one failing and losing money. Irene was once a happy hippy chick who now goes weeks with horrific pain in her head for which doctors can find no source. They have two children, Mark and Rhoda. Mark is barely in their lives but Rhoda has a dream of helping them find salvation with each other.

Irene is the survivor of her mother’s suicide. Her father was cheating and her mother decided to take her own life instead of living for Irene. Rhoda is on the verge of marrying a dentist who has already begun to cheat on her during their engagement. He has things all planned out. He’ll keep switching receptionists, having affairs with them and then letting them go. It sounds like Rhoda is heading for the same train wreck as her mother and grandmother – a distant marriage and an unfaithful husband. Many of these themes appear in Vann’s brilliant first book, Legend of a Suicide.

Caribou Island has many of the same themes as Legend of a Suicide – the inability to find intimacy with others, the desire to hurt those we try to love, and not knowing how to do things right in our own lives and for others. This book is not for the weak-hearted. It is bold and brutal, never a syrupy sentence or a hi-jinks kinda laugh. It is as serious as the death of a loved one. Even aspects of the book such as boat rides take on a dire nature and I had to wonder what awful thing would come next.

This is a reader’s book. It is a book for people who love to read and it is why we read. It is one of the best books I have read recently and it knocked my socks off. More importantly, it changed how I see the world. It is THAT good.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 76 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (January 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Vann
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Legend of a Suicide Another review of Caribou Island Also, see our review of a T.C. Boyle novel: Drop City

Bibliography:

• Legends of a Suicide: Stories (2010)
• Caribou Island (2011)
• Dirt (2012)
• Goat Mountain (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea (2005)

“My name is Katherine, same as my mother’s name, same as my mother’s mother’s name. I’ve never been a Kathy, never been a Kath, not a Katie or a Kate, not a Kat, a Kitty, a Kitten, not a Kit. Katherine I have always been, as Katherine I am today.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (DEC 09, 2010)

Dozens of books have promised the sentiment “for lovers of Cormac McCarthy” and left me sorely disappointed. But, in this claim, Froderberg is truly McCarthy’s literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir, if not yet fully capturing his linguistic sublimity and lethal, graveyard humor. In this ambitious debut novel, the author explores desperate and broken souls living through a drought in southern Arizona—a land of sand and scrub, cactus stands, spiny shrubs, bitterbrush, dusty maiden, diamondbacks, rodeos, distant foothills, punishing climate, and an endless starlit sky. If you don’t like McCarthy’s prose style, you surely won’t relish Froderberg’s highly stylized prose and narrative, either. If, like me, you adore McCarthy’s (particularly his southwest) lore, such as The Border Trilogy, then you can potentially connect with and savor this quasi-mythical tale.

Seventeen-year-old bride Katherine lives with her (significantly older) husband, Son, and his kind-hearted and affluent parents, Rose and “Rose’s Daddy,” on their ranch on Old Border Road, in a stately adobe house above an aquifer. Rose’s Daddy calls Katherine “Girl” (affectionately), and Son calls her Darlin.’ She accepts her new identity and learns how to live and work on the ranch, including horse riding, barrel racing, and driving the water truck. Besides prospering from the ranch, Rose’s Daddy channels water to the coast, just like his father did, earning a heavy bounty and a lot of frowns from the local people. He tells Girl the history of the nomads who wandered to this land, leading up to his own father’s industrious wealth.

“They sought a fabled people within a fabled landscape. They sought a promised life…They walked across sandbanks of hot ash, the ground on which they walked trembling like paper sheeting, as if it were a fiery lake bubbling and steaming right beneath them.”

The narrative, told in Katherine’s voice, reads a lot like gothic fable. Although set in contemporary times, there is a timeless quality about it, and the author’s temporal sense is frequently ephemeral. Like McCarthy, she plays with tenses, and sustains a biblical subtext and timbre.

“The words as they were chalked, the sand and the dust, the grime and the duff and the tar and the oil and the mud, and whatever else of the earth we collect along the way, will all be washed away in the moon after, once we are back to here where we are, to begin another beginning.”

Katherine tells the story of the drought, of Son’s cruel infidelities, stemming from Rose’s Daddy’s infidelities, of Rose’s fragility, and the ghosts of stories that still haunt the adobe house. The desire of Katherine to stand by Son is increasingly frustrating as the story progresses, but taken as poetic fable, I was able to tolerate it. The characters are often not what they seem, and some shocking revelations are even more unnerving to the reader as the protagonist continues to honor her spousal obligations. Most characters do not develop over time; rather, who they are amplifies, the aperture widens, and the person you see is more resonant and less inscrutable, but unchanged. Unlike McCarthy, the author portrays a woman with some finesse.

There is a New Age priest, known as Padre, who beguiles his congregation with a noble mien and zen-like homilies, and whose relationship with Katherine leads her to a further maturity of mind, while she retains her fastness of character, deepening it. A rancher and businesswoman named Pearl Hart, her husband, Ham, and her daughter, also named Pearl, round out the story and enlarge the myth and mystery of the town.

You don’t read this novel for the individual characters but for their fate, and for Katherine’s. You read it for the themes of disillusionment and strength; the narrative grip of lush, elliptical language; the earthly elements that imperil and fortify these marginal people; and for the landscape that resounds like a character. You tacitly observe what is in a name, and what is not.

At times, the author’s talent overreaches, and the overwrought language and florid descriptions threaten to choke the narrative flow. I occasionally experienced reader fatigue. Froderberg hasn’t yet harnessed the nuanced linguistics and tension of McCarthy and his ability to create a chemical reaction in the reader, although she clearly is aspiring to. The tale acquired some dark humor toward the end, which the story was begging for at intervals. The problem with her style so closely resembling the master is that she hasn’t fully developed her own unique one. When she fails to attain McCarthy’s bracing, muscular tongue and allegorical depth, the reader notices her self-conscious drive to try.

As a novelist, this is Susan Froderberg’s first rodeo, and I am inclined to give the rope some slack. She is a debut author that will surely evolve over time. This is an earnest, inspired start, and facets of the story were well realized. I was exceptionally moved when I came to the last line of the story, a sentence that touched me with its purity, subtlety, and pith. Those final words fall strikingly smooth on the page, seizing the moment with indelible ink, without a hitch, without a sound.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (December 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	BookPage interview with Susan Froderberg
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Southwesterns: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Old Border Road (December 2010)

“The idea that we were going back to the land made me laugh. It was the word back. With our son, who was less than a year old my husband and I moved into an unfinished cabin on a sixty-acre woodlot in downeast Maine with no electricity, no plumbing, no phone. It was June 1971.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 14, 2010)

As the title suggests, this is a book about living close to nature, or rather, being a part of nature while cognizant of that important and salient fact. For, what more can we be reminded of, if not reminded that we are biology first? It is easy to forget that we are made of the salt of the sea and the grist the land, that atoms and molecules somehow cohere and survive and become…us. That is the delicate core of the quiet little book. We are of nature, let us not forget. The writing in this tradition is long and rich and deep. Henry David Thoreau to Audubon to Anne Dillard and E.O. Wilson–all master practitioners of the genre. And now Susan Hand Shetterly. She is in heady company and she belongs there. This book is spellbinding.

As the quote above relates–it’s the opening sentence to the book–Shetterly and her young family moved to rural Mane in 1971. They split wood. They read by kerosene lamp. They grow food. And most importantly, amidst it all, the author pays attention. If nothing else, this exquisite little book is a meditation on paying attention. Thoreau said he went to the woods to learn how to live. Although Shetterly never explicitly tells us what set her upon this course, the motive–how to live–hangs suspended and crystalline quite close to the surface. For her, the answer seems not simple, yet is stark, complex but not complicated: Live close, close to nature, close to that which is wild, close to what makes you alive. “We give wild a chance,” she writes, “and sometimes it comes back, and we are better for it.”

Settled into the Wild is a collection of twenty-six overlapping and related essays. Many are about the animals who, literally, cross her path. Several are about the people, the farmers and the fishermen, who inhabit the land. Several essays overlap, people and animals, the town and the wild. All the pieces are gem-like, written with great care and loving attention. When civilization and the wild overlap, we get perhaps the most powerful images of the book. For instance:

“A neighbor of mine walked onto the deck of his house one early morning just before hunting season with a mug of coffee in his hand, took a sip, and glanced down the cobbles of Patten Bay to the gunmetal water. He looked again. There, up to its belly in the tide, stood a doe. Two coyotes patrolled the beach in front of her. Back and forth they paced over the stones, stopping every now and then to fix her with their eyes. She stood with her head up, frozen in one posture, the water sloshing at her sides. Alert to every move they made, she did not look directly at them. They looked at her straight on.”

Perhaps the most poignant observations in the book are made when the author invites and infuses into her life the wildness found outside her door. There is, for example, a raven named Chac. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “in the high branches of a spruce, there sat a rough nest with four young ravens in it.” She continues: “Three flourished. One did not. Three grew up and flew, but one did not. The parents fed the bird in the nest now and then, but they spent more time with the healthy birds, and then, one day, they did not return.” Shetterly, a licensed expert at wild bird rehabilitation, takes in the raven, heals it–it was bound with fishermen’s monofilament in the nest–raises it, and eventually returns it to the wild. “Letting him go meant that he would never abide a sheltered life. I offered this tamed and crippled wild prince his own ancestral home–bounteous and dangerous.” It is a potential of this type of writing to turn mandolin, to a anthropomorphize wild beasts and then sting the reader for doing so with tales of death or loss or abandon. Shetterly aptly avoids this trap and instead, like a good artful teacher, teaches us of her world without pathos.

Wild birds aside, there are snakes in the bedroom, country roads paved, trees hugged; there are ocean-going farmers studied and crickets caught. Salmons escape their pens and are slaughtered, alewives migrate and rural communities are threatened. Of a neighbor, Shetterly writes, “Jack was one of the first people I knew who lived a sense of place.” This observation stands out and proves to be a watermark for the book. Shetterly too lives a sense of place, to use her phrase. She has arrived there through observation, patience and hard work, and not without a good deal of poetry and art. It is the reader’s privilege to be welcomed into her world. One can learn better how to live studying such a life.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (January 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Hand Shetterly
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Fictional back to the land stories: Drop City by T.C. Boyle Country Called Home by Kim Barnes

Bibliography:

• The New Year’s Owl: Encounters with Animals, People and the Land They Share (1986)
• Settled into the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Janaury 2010)

Children’s Books:

• The Dwarf-Wizard of Uxmal (1990)
• The Tinker of Salt Cove (1990)
• Raven’s Light (1991)
• Muwin and the Magic Hare (1993)
• Shelterwood (2001)