The Sentence by Louise Erdrich – Book

Having seen announcements of Louise Erdrich books for some time on Amazon, Goodreads and in the New York Times, I decided that I should read one. I knew nothing about Erdrich’s connections to indigenous people and shame on me. The Sentence begins with a set up. Tookie, our main character, describes herself as solid and unattractive. She had to raise herself because her mother was addicted to drugs and was so often using that she had nothing to offer Tookie, which certainly explains Tookie’s lack of self-confidence.

Tookie answered a call from someone she had been close to and agreed to perform a task that every cell in her brain rebelled against. She did it out of a sense of duty owed to a pair of old friends. Her friends betrayed her. Tookie ended up sentenced to fifteen years in jail. There was no one on the outside to care about her except a tribal police officer named Pollux. But if you need someone to care about you Pollux is your man. He felt so guilty about arresting Tookie that he hovered nearby, and he even quit the tribal police force.

Love does wonders when it is a supportive force, as it is in Tookie’s life. She finds a job in a bookstore that specializes in native books and her love of books makes her invaluable to Asema, the owner. Penstemon also works at the bookstore. Obviously being an indigenous author opens up a wide range of interesting character names. Pollux attends native ceremonies, drums for the dancers and feeds everyone. All goes well until two complications arise. A customer named Flora dies, but for some reason she still hangs out at the bookstore every day. Tookie can hear her bracelets, her footwear on the floors, her silky clothing swishing. Sometimes Flora knocks books off the shelves in front of where Tookie is working. Since no one else can hear Flora Tookie at first says nothing, but after she finds a mysterious book that seems to have caused Flora’s death, Erdrich’s title takes on a new meaning. Tookie believes that when Flora read a certain sentence in the book it killed her. Tookie buries the book next to the tree that recently fell in her yard, but signs are adding up. Eventually the other two in the bookstore sense Flora’s presence.

The other complication that arises is the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, which has the bookstore busier than ever with mail orders. But Tookie cannot work in the shop alone, the sense that Flora wants something from her is too menacing. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Flora has adopted an indigenous heritage when she is not indigenous at all? Between being unable to visit Pollux, sick with COVID and in the hospital, trying to forge a better relationship with Pollux’s daughter and her new baby boy, and the terror she is beginning to feel whenever Flora makes her presence known in the bookstore, Tookie is having a difficult time holding on to the sanity she found in her relationship with Pollux. She is reliving past sorrows.

Erdrich obviously loves books and is a voracious reader. When her tale is done, and throughout the book great titles and exciting reads spill out, and as a bonus end up in lists of book recommendations at the end of the story. Read with a pen and paper handy because you will want to write down those book titles. Nothing like a good haunting, insight into indigenous lives, and a precarious love story to provide readers with a book that is hard to put down.

Anthem by Noah Hawley – Book

Anthem was a gutsy title for Noah Hawley to choose since the original book with that title was written by Ayn Rand. His invocation of the previous book was perhaps done deliberately to stress his similar themes and to point out that threats to the free world now may be as serious as the threat of the rise of Hitler was in 1937 when Rand wrote her book.

Hawley’s book takes place in near-future America. Teens are committing suicide, and no one knows why. Parents are devastated but they don’t seem to blame themselves for their children’s choices. Simon loses his older sister Claire in just such a way. His anxiety disorder soars, his grief for his sister is all-encompassing, and his wealthy parents eventually place him in a center that tries to prevent the inevitable in children who are exhibiting signs that they should not be left alone. At the recovery center Simon is given a program of medications to treat just about every mental ailment that medication has been created for. He meets a young black girl named Louise who has suffered and wants revenge on someone she calls The Wizard, and he meets another teen named Paul, who wants to be called The Prophet.

America is the same mess we see around us right now only the social diseases are further along a scale indicating that collapse and chaos are imminent. Simon’s father makes a pill that is as addictive as opioids and yet he never accepts that his destructive path to personal wealth might have been what upset his daughter, although she papered the bathroom where she bled out with the wrappers that held her father’s pills.

The original trio is joined by others they collect along the way, Felix, aka Samson, son of Avon who lives way off the grid. Felix shares a guilty secret with his father. Story is the girl Felix falls in love with and is hiding out with. Story’s mother is in the process of getting approved as a Supreme Court Justice. Story doesn’t know that Felix has another name, his off-the-grid name. Felix’s sister, Bathsheba has been kidnapped by a billionaire with a taste for sex with very young girls, (parallel with Jeffrey Epstein’s predation scheme right down to the female “friend” who keeps him supplied). Bathsheba, now called Katie, has been impregnated by her keeper, The Wizard, and she is being held as a prisoner in a compound in Texas until she gives birth. Louise was molested by this same billionaire who lives in houses all over the world and never has to suffer any consequences for his horrific behavior.

As the teens make plans to rescue Bathsheba, as they collect weapons and learn to use them, the world explodes around them and complicates their mission. There are militias all over the place, some organized, some not. Why are the teens feeling such despair? Is there any hope for creating a world where money doesn’t rule and any endeavor, no matter how harmful to a healthy society, is fine if it offers material rewards? The Prophet tags along on all the rescues but his true purpose is for this band of unlikely heroes to establish a utopia, to start over and to not make the same mistakes as their parents and ancestors.

Noah Hawley breaks the “rules” of writing fiction by breaking into the story to present commentary about the events of the story and to talk about the questions his daughter asks about what he is writing. It may not be part of usual story structure to sort of “break the frame,” but Hawley also writes for TV and movies which may explain his willingness to use story structure creatively. This is just the sort of dystopian tale that I enjoy, especially because of the social commentary that also tags along for the ride. One more thing – if you get a text message that says “A ll” you had better get a copy of Anthem right away so that you will be able to decode the message.

Is it possible for flawed humans to create a Utopian society? Maybe not, but if it takes a few centuries for a culture to turn bad then starting from scratch every now and then may be the only way to avoid the human capacity for rationalization, for turning our worst traits into self-destructive positives.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr – Book

It’s possible, but not certain, that the city named “Cloud Cuckoo Land” dates back to an Aristophanes story “The Birds” written in 414 B. C. E. “…how long had those tablets moldered inside that chest, waiting for eyes to read them? While I am sure you will doubt the truth of the outlandish events they relate, my dear niece, in my transcription, I do not leave out a word. Maybe in the old days men did walk the earth as beasts, and a city of birds floated in the heavens between the realms of men and gods. Or maybe, like all lunatics, the shepherd made his own truth, and so for him, true it was. But let us turn to his story now, and decide his sanity for ourselves.” (pg.14)

So, we start with a book, an old, old book, a book that has been wet and attacked by mold and lost for uncounted amounts of time. We end with the book in a new form, translated by Zeno Ninis who learned Greek from his fellow prisoner in a POW camp in the Korean War. The book may be fiction, and the characters may be fiction but the power of a great story to offer hope, to mellow grief, to calm anxiety has been a factor in many of our lives.

Anthony Doerr wrote All the Light You Cannot See. If he never wrote another book that one volume would be enough to keep him in my list of great authors. But here is another great book that stretches from the siege of Constantinople to sometime in the future. In the legend there is a shepherd who hears the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, and he learns that if you get to that land, you will be satisfied; that restlessness and yearning will no longer hound you. In the clouds where the birds circle the cloud towers is peace. But humans cannot go there, only animals. The shepherd uses magic, but it backfires, and he turns into a donkey. You will hear this story repeated in every age and the tale works its magic on many humans, even though they cannot expect to find Cloud Cuckoo Land unless they are transformed by the gods because of their deeds into a bird who can fly there. There is more to the shepherd’s story, but you should discover it for yourself.

Two characters are alive at the siege of Constantinople – Omeir and Anna. Anna finds the old manuscript when she is trying to save the life of her sister. Zeno begins his life about 18 years before the Korean War. The Cunningham sisters are librarians at the local library in Lakeport, Idaho. They introduce Zeno to the Greek writers, especially Aristophanes and his birds. There are birds everywhere in this story, especially owls. Seymour lives in the same place as Zeno, but when Seymour is a young man Zeno is in his eighties. Seymour has a mental disorder that involves hypersensitivity to sounds. His mother Bunny is patient but must work two jobs to support the two of them. Once Seymour disobeys Bunny and goes to the woods behind their double-wide he begins to communicate with a Great Grey Owl, and he finds peace in nature. When developers buy the land and remove the forest Seymour’s anger cannot be eased. We also have Konstance who is travelling aboard the Argos to a new earth she will not live long enough to see.

Perhaps an homage to books, because of the lengths people go to save this book and because of the number of different historical contexts in which the story lives in the minds of readers; perhaps a coming-of-age story, there is yet another aspect of Doerr’s book that speaks about the damages done to our modern world, and the possible dystopia that awaits. “In late August, twin forest fires in Oregon burn a million acres each, and smoke gushes into Lakeport. The sky turns the color of putty, and anyone who steps outdoors returns smelling like a campfire. Restaurant patios close, weddings move inside, youth sports are canceled; the air is deemed too dangerous for children to play outside.” (pg. 487)

Konstance, in the Argos seems to be the only person left after her fellow travelers die in an epidemic that sweeps through the ship. She has her “perambulator” and access to a prodigious digital library. She makes it through a year of solitude by cutting up pieces of her 3D-printer powdered food sacks and writing down the stories her father told her about a donkey and a place called Cloud Cuckoo Land. If you like fantasies there is plenty of that; but it you require realism, there is also plenty of that. What book would you take with you if you could only take one. So many found exactly what they needed in Antonius Diogenes’ 24 Folios about a place called Cloud Cuckoo Land. The connections made between characters and eras in this book may remind you of your own eureka moments when your brain made similar connections as you read books and learned your way through life.

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen – Book

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen took me back into my childhood. My large, unruly childhood family lived next door to a quaint and very tolerant Mennonite couple. Franzen’s main character in Crossroads grew up in a Mennonite family, living in a Mennonite community. These simple folks, similar to the Amish people, usually eschew modern machines and inventions, although Russ Hildebrandt’s family did have tractors. Mennonites are often farmers because other careers take them out of their spiritual comfort zone.

Russ leaves the Mennonite community in Lesser Hebron, Indiana where they practice simplicity “to make the Kingdom of Heaven manifest on earth.” He learned about serving others because it was a way of life. His father was the pastor for the community. His mother “made emulating Christ seem effortlessly rewarding.” Russ left because he was drafted in 1944 with five semesters of college completed. Because he could not shun his grandfather for living with his girlfriend, Russ’s family disowned him. He did his army service at a former CCC camp outside Flagstaff, Arizona, which is where he connected with the Navajo people who he continued to visit over the years. He was comfortable with the Navajos because he understood that they lived simply, also for spiritual reasons.

Because of Russ’s background sexual thoughts presented as a feeling of nausea. These thoughts were sinful. While still in the army he met Marion, his future wife, and learned that the way his body reacted, in his case, to women was natural but had to be governed and controlled by will. Marion was a Catholic girl with many secrets of her own and she carried with her the kind of guilt that caused monks to flagellate themselves or wear hair shirts constantly irritating their skin.

These two complicated people (and aren’t we all complicated) parented four children; Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson and lived together peacefully until they all reached a sort of midlife crisis as three of their children entered puberty and a beautiful widow arrived at the First Reformed Church where Russ was the Associate Pastor. He was feeling low, having recently been replaced as the Youth Group leader by a younger hipper hiree. Marion was also at a crossroads. In fact, Crossroads was the name of the church youth group and clearly a symbol of one of the themes of the novel.

It’s the 70’s, near the end of the Vietnam War. There are no cell phones; there is no social media, but there are drugs. When parent’s lives go off the rails even temporarily, families can suffer losses. As children begin to see the flaws in their parents and separation begins, children may make choices that dismay even the most distracted of parents.

Underpinning this story of an American family lies a nuanced conversation about God and Jesus, faith and religion, service to others and self-absorption. There is nothing preachy about it. Because Jonathan Franzen is able to entwine spirituality around the lives he depicts and the events he recounts, the exploration of spirituality is where the true value of this book lies. It reverberates in your mind and reminds you that you may indeed have a soul.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles – Book

In Amor Towles book, The Lincoln Highway, Billy Watson, young brother of main character Emmett, has been staying with a neighbor, Sally. His brother was serving a sentence at a juvenile work farm, his father recently died, and Billy is living out of his backpack which he keeps very close. In the backpack, along with his collection of silver dollars, is his treasured edition of Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and other Intrepid Travelers. These heroes whether mythical or real are beginning a new journey to complete a task or find something that is lost or to take care of a responsibility that has been entrusted to them. In other words, they are on a quest.

As the brothers are going through their father’s things they discover postcards from their mother, who left them on a memorable Fourth of July. The postcards, addressed to the boys show the stops their mom made on her trip west and the postcards stop at San Francisco, suggesting that that is where she may have settled to begin her new life. The thing they know for sure about her is that she loved fireworks and never missed an Independence Day display. Billy also knew from his mom’s postcard that there was such a spectacle every Fourth in San Francisco. Emmett loves his brother and he wants to please him but he wants to go to Texas. He was an apprentice to a local builder and now he wants to buy and restore houses, but he needs a city that is growing. After some research in the library (it’s the fifties, no internet, no cell phones) he discovers that San Francisco is growing even faster than Texas. The brothers agree to go to San Francisco on the Lincoln Highway, a real American highway that runs from coast to coast.

Every good quest meets with obstacles and this quest is no exception. Two of Emmett’s incarcerated friends show up at the repossessed farm as the brothers prepare to leave. They have not been legally released from their sentences. Duchess and Woolly are two very different individuals. Woolly may have a slight mental disability, but he was born into a wealthy family. His father died and he is set to inherit a fairly large sum of money. Duchess is an opportunist. He never had a stable place to rest his head; his father was an itinerant actor who was often drunk. Duchess has a certain charisma though, and he has a ton of nerve. He doesn’t want to go to San Francisco. He wants to go to New York City to collect Woolly’s fortune. So he and a reluctant Woolly steal the car that Emmett paid for with his own apprentice pay and he leaves Emmett and Billy to find their own way to San Francisco. If a quest must have obstacles this twist is the first in a long line of them. It forces Emmett and Billy to follow Duchess and Woolly to New York City, not only to recover the car but to retrieve the envelop containing the $3,000 their father left for them in the well with the spare tire.

Take the Lincoln Highway on this wild quest and you will meet more heroes and villains than you have in many a day. And you will discover that ordinary people often contain the stuff of heroes, and villains. Amor Towles writes about the quirks of human nature in ways that allow us to focus on what is best about us and what is worst about us. It’s a long journey but it goes quickly and yet the heroes pace is slowed by many astonishing events.

Silverview by John Le Carré – Book

From a Google Image Search – Time Magazine

In an ‘afterword’ to the book Silverview, Le Carré’s youngest son, Nick Cornwell, tells us that the manuscript for this book was one his father worked on and set aside. He never seemed completely satisfied with it, but it was essentially finished. This was not one of those posthumous agreements allowing a new person to complete an unfinished manuscript. A bit of simple editing was all that was required. Silverview by John Le Carré offers fans a temporary reprieve from the finality of a beloved author’s passing.

Julian Lawndsley has grown a conscience and left his successful career in the stock market to move to a small town by the sea. He opens a bookstore. He is not a reader and knows next to nothing about books, but he has a bank roll, and he has style. Julian is just considering leaving his new life behind to go back to what he knows because business is slow and boring. Then Edward Avon wanders in. Here is a man who is alive and exciting, even if slightly dodgy, and he knows books. He is also a mystery, quite inscrutable. Little does Julian know that he is being used by a spy gone rogue, a man married to a spy who is dying.

This is new territory for Le Carré, with new characters and new locations – no George Smiley, no Russia. Edward had been active in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia where ethnic cleansing can sicken even the most intrepid spirit. Edward cannot stay objective, and he questions whether an agency that requires its employees to stay objective should even exist. We view events through Julian’s eyes, the view of a mystified bookseller who is currently, in his new life, a fish out of water. The point of view allows Le Carré to fill the reader in little by little, creating that fog of intelligence work so familiar throughout his oeuvre.

Silverview is the house of spies where Edward’s wife lives while she is dying. The fog of secrecy emanates from Silverview. The fog is part of the appeal. It confuses our reader’s view of Edward’s secret lapse from the rules of intelligence. However, his misadventures are not as secret from his handlers as he thinks. Edward and his wife Debbie have a daughter. Lily, who has a two-year-old son, Sam, and no husband. Julian may end up losing his partnership with Edward, but he may have found a new reason to stay in this village by the sea. Edward is up to something but my lips are sealed.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead – Book

In the first chapter of his book Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead sucked me right into his world. It was serendipity. His main character, Ray Carney, was driving in his truck to see Aronowitz, an old man who was a wizard at fixing up TVs and radios. Aronowitz had a shop full of tubes, TV tubes, radio tubes. It’s 1959, that’s what was inside radios and TVs in those days. I felt at home because my father’s basement workshop was full of those same tubes and the neighbors’ TVs and radios that needed repairs.’

Ray Carney is the owner of a furniture store at a good spot on 125 th street. He precariously straddles a life as a proud small businessman and a fence for stolen goods, because he can’t seem to leave behind his crooked cousin Freddie, his almost brother since early childhood. As Freddie’s life deteriorates, Carney’s life improves, but it is a life and death struggle. Between characters like Miami Joe, Chink Montague, and Pepper who keep pulling him into illegal schemes and the beat cop, Detective Munson, making him pay protection, getting ahead was like maneuvering through a minefield. It did help that criminals switched girlfriends a lot and bought a new dinette set for each lady friend.

There is a heist that Carney is roped into by Freddie and there is the rumor of an extremely valuable necklace. How far will Carney go to protect his dream and his ‘new apartment fund’, his wife Elizabeth and his little son and daughter? How far will he have to go? When Carney is moved to take revenge against Wilfred Dukes for one betrayal too many, Carney shows his focus and effectiveness, which suggest that he would have made a better crook than most of the crooks around him. Then Harlem erupts in violence when a young black man is killed by a policeman without any justification. Carney hunkers down in his store with his Heywood-Wakefield furniture lines and his Argent recliners and stays there day and night until the riots end and his store is safe, because the riots did not come to his little corner of the world

Most of us, if we are trying to get ahead in business do not have to face the challenges that Ray Carney had to face. There is a good argument in this story for taking Carney’s businessman route as opposed to the chaos of pursuing illegal means to get rich. Some people who break laws and learn to be tough, who will kill at the slightest provocation may manage to find their way into a legal and better life, but the odds are not great. Once Freddie meets Linus, a rich and interesting guy and an addict, Freddie’s fate is sealed, and Carney ends up in possession of that necklace full of emeralds which he has no idea how to rid himself of. This is a story of Harlem, but it could just as easily take place in any modern city. Colson Whitehead once again shows his chops as a writer.

The Reading List by Sara Nishe Adams – Book

From a Google Image Search – goodreads.com

In Sara Nishe Adams’ book The Reading List, one of the main characters, Aleisha, has a summer job at the Harrow Road Library, a small neighborhood library in danger of closing. The library has been forgotten by residents in the bustle of daily life. Aleisha is at the checkout desk and is not in a good mood when an old man, Mukesh, cannot even open the door to the library. She is short with him, and he leaves upset. Aleisha’s boss takes her to task about her behavior. She is the librarian he tells her. She needs to take her responsibilities seriously. Aleisha is young. She doesn’t like being scolded, but she got this job because her brother, Aidan loved this library and he had also worked there one summer. She decided she would behave for her brother’s sake. When Mukesh forces himself to return to the library Aleisha is a different person. She has found a list in the library, left on a table. It’s a reading list. The first book on the list is To Kill a Mockingbird, although the first book mentioned in a chapter title is The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Mukesh lost his wife to cancer. She was a voracious reader. Mukesh was not. His wife also read books with her granddaughter Priya, and Priya became a book lover like Naina. Mukesh was not making much headway with Priya. She would find a chair at his house and read and ignore her grandfather. When Aleisha recommended that Mukesh read To Kill a Mockingbird, the book interrupted his grief and gave him a way to stay close to his wife even after death. This also gave him a way to be more pleasing in the eyes of his granddaughter, Priya.

In fact, everyone who found that reading list, including Leonora, Chris, Indira, Izzy, Joseph, Gigi, Aleisha, Mukesh found their lives changed by the characters and themes in those books and by sharing their thoughts about the books with others. Eventually, it seems, the repercussions from this ‘reading list’ may even end up saving the Harrow Road Library.

This is a simple tale that ends up having more depth than you would think. The problems these characters are dealing with in their personal lives are rather serious ones that could derail a life, and in real life such traumas do psychological damage that loneliness exacerbates. Some of these characters have lost loved ones, some are troubled by social difficulties, one character is dealing with such hopelessness that he cannot cope with it. Not everyone is saved. But a community of fictional characters, relevant plots, and a cause offers a reset to more than one of the characters in The Reading List, who are intended to represent real people.

Who made the copies of this book list and distributed them? Will we find out? What nationalities are these people who all live in London now? Do people from Kenya eat Indian food? What is the religion of many of the characters? Does it matter if we know the answers to any of these questions when the same solution seemed to work to pull almost everyone out of their personal preoccupations and isolation. It’s a sweet book. I know we are not supposed to use the word ‘sweet’ when describing literature. There is bitterness in this story also. But it is an uplifting story overall and it would not hurt anyone to read the books on that reading list. In fact, I might read some of them again.

The Guide by Peter Heller – Book

From a Google Image Search – The Independent

The Guide by Peter Heller also features Jack from Heller’s book The River. In The River Jack loses his best friend, Wynn. Wynn was the poet of the pair, so we lose some of the cadence of the story of the canoe trip to Hudson Bay. Jack has been back at home helping his father on their ranch and things are caught up leaving Jack some time to take a guide job and earn some money. Not only was Jack practically born on a horse, but he is an excellent fisherman, kayaker, and canoeist. A lodge serving very wealthy clients has lost a guide mid-season so Jack takes the position. He regrets his decision almost as soon as he meets the man who runs the operation, Kurt Jensen, and learns all the strange rules about what he is and is not allowed to do. Jack feels that something about the place just doesn’t feel right. He immediately goes off fishing to learn the streams and because he feels better when he is smelling pine and tying flies and drifting his line into a spot full of the kinds of bugs fish loved to eat.

He is assigned to be fishing guide and teacher for Alison K., who he intuits is someone famous. He doesn’t recognize her, but as they spend the days on the stream, he recognizes that she is a famous singer from the snatches of song she sings to herself as she fishes. The odd part of this place is all the prohibitions. You could not go past the bridge across the stream because the old man on the property next door would shoot you. There were cameras mounted in places where no cameras should be needed. Jack could not keep his guns with him, or his truck. You needed a passcode to go anywhere. Kurt seemed upset when Alison and Jack went into town for dinner one night. The people seemed odd also. They had bandages on their hands and circles under their eyes one day and the next they were perky and well. Fortunately, Jack finds an ally in Alison. They fish and snoop together.

This book is driven by plot much more than The River which was driven also by the style of the prose. The topic of The Guide is shocking and one that has not often come up in other books I have read. As a mystery, this story works very well. It also has an element of social commentary to give it heft. And our heroes come close to dying. Except for the lack of romance, which is sort of refreshing, it’s all very satisfying. And my mind foresees the possibility of future romance. I know, I am such a girl. Just ignore it if it offends.

The River by Peter Heller – Book

From a Google Image Search – Criminal Element

The River by Peter Heller took me back to my teen years when my brother and his best friend, if they had more money, could have easily been Jack and Wynn, the young men in this story. This is a tale that runs by as fast as a river current. Jack and Wynn love nothing better than being outdoors, adventuring in a canoe, fishing and hunting and smoking their pipes on a riverbank in front of a fire. They are both very experienced. Jack grew up on a ranch and lived on horseback from a very young age. He learned to accept both hardships and pleasures as normal occurrences. His judgment did not get clouded by adrenaline. Wynn grew up in the more tamed nature of New England in a loving family. He knew how to stay safe when away from civilization, but he did not have to develop the toughness that Jack’s life required.

These two friends, brought together by their interests, have planned to go on a canoe trip up to Hudson Bay. They have carefully collected their supplies and figured out how to stow them in the canoe to keep their craft balanced and to keep their supplies dry. But there are forces afoot on the river that leads to Hudson Bay over which they have no control. There are two other parties on the river. That should not have been a problem, but people are unpredictable, even adventurers do not all have trustworthy characters. Nature becomes a potent adversary in this river equation as these folks all try to outrun a forest fire to make it to Hudson Bay to get a plane out. The one thing Jack and Wynn decided not to bring with them, a sat phone, would have been the most essential tool to have on this expedition. What ensues is one nail-biting situation after another. You may be able to trust your boon companion, but you cannot trust other people and you cannot predict what nature will throw at you. (And, perhaps, you don’t want to be a woman on the river.)

The voice of the narrator, with its Hemingwayesque short ‘illegal’ sentences suits the backwoods adventure and these young men who approach life, if not grammar, with planning and almost reverence for form and well-practiced routines. Frequent literary references show that these boys are more than just hicks. This is a voice I have heard before, but my brain won’t remind me of exactly what author it resembles, perhaps Mark Twain. Poetic descriptions are drawn without effort, never overdone.

“The canoe moved this morning as if greased. North again toward the top of the lake where it became a true river. They let their eyes rove the shore looking for the colors of a tent or tents, the shape of a boat on a beach, but saw only more patches of yellow in the trees and a swath of orange black-eyed Susans on the shore. They watched a skein of geese fly over that end of the lake, just one side of the V, an uneven phalanx that curved and straightened as they flew in constant correction. The distant barks drifted down.” (Pg. 36)

“They got hot. They paddled hard. Almost thirty miles on a flat-water current was a long way even for them. Because the river slowed and expended itself in unexpected wide coves. From which loons called as they passed—the rising wail that cracked the afternoon with irrepressible longing and seemed to darken the sky. The ululant laughter that followed. Mirthless and sad. And from across the slough or from far downstream the cry that answered.” (Pg. 1160

There is a new book The Guide by Peter Heller which features Jack once again. Can’t wait.