“I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perksie  (FEB 14, 2014)

Swan Gondola literally starts off with a bang! Two elderly sisters, Emmaline and Hester, known by most in their small county, as the “Old Sisters Egan,” are sitting in their Nebraska farm kitchen drinking coffee. The day has been a peaceful one. Suddenly the house begins to shiver and shake and they are enveloped in noise, a loud BANG!! Books fall from their shelves, china dishes and cups fall to the floor, breaking, chimney bricks drop into the hearth, their caged canaries stop singing and the two sisters are left stunned, shocked. Hester, the tough one, lifts her rifle and opens the door, not knowing what to expect. She and petite, romantic Emmaline, are immediately enveloped in silk. Silk is everywhere. They have witnessed so much in their lives on the farm that nothing really surprises them anymore. The silk comes from a ruined hot air balloon which has apparently crashed into their roof. “Escaped the circus?” Hester wonders. The two immediately search for the pilot, who could be hurt or, even worse, dead. They do find the man alive, flat on his back on the ground, his left leg in a terrible bend. Emmaline’s and Hester’s discovery of the balloon’s pilot will change their lives forever as he relates his strange, mesmerizing and sorry tale.

Obviously in pain, the man snaps his fingers weakly and a card slips from his sleeve which reads, “B. ‘Ferret’ Skerritt, Omaha, Nebraska.” And on the back “This slight of hand you just witnessed is only a hint of my wizardry.” From his inside pocket a postcard falls. Written by Ferret, it gives the reader an example of his unrequited love for his beloved, Mrs. Cecily Wakefield of Omaha. Their’s is a star-crossed love…dramatic, romantic and heartbreaking.

Thus we meet our protagonist whose name is really Bartholomew Skerritt. He is an orphan, (now 25 years-old), left at the door of a Catholic orphanage when he was an infant. Sister Patience told him, “All orphans are born of whores.” There was a note that his mother had tucked into his little suit. “She had addressed the baby as Mr. Bartholomew Skerritt and written: ‘Your last name is your daddy’s last name, (I’m damned sure of it, don’t let anybody tell you different), and your first name was the longest first name I’ve ever seen written down. I can’t give you nothing much but I can give you a name with lots of letters in it. Sincerely, the mother you never knew.'” Reflecting back on his childhood, Ferret says: “Childhood is too awful a thing to make happen to somebody.”

When he was a boy he met librarian, Mr. Crowe. Crowe’s real vocation is that of a ventriloquist. He took a shine to Bartholomew and taught him about the world of books, and more importantly to the boy’s future, how to excel as a ventriloquist.

Ferret has become a petty thief and con-man who currently works as a ventriloquist and a magician at a vaudeville theater, (before the Fair). He usually follows the carny circuit with his unique dummy, Oscar. It is at the Empress Opera House where he meets and immediately falls in love with the mysterious Cecily, an actress with an unknown history. “I heard her name before I saw her, backstage.”

The narrative takes place in the Sisters Egan’s farmhouse while he is recovering. The ever practical Hester, who acts as the community’s amateur veterinarian, has patched him up and put his leg in a cast. It is at the farmhouse where he relates his tale. The author effectively uses letters from Ferret to Cecily, and from Cecily to him, to further the storyline, which weaves back and forth in time from Autumn 1898 to the winter of 1899.

This story-within-a-story begins in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Omaha, Nebraska, is still a noisy, dirty frontier city whose nickname was the “Gateway to the West.” The author writes, “The Omaha World’s Fair, as depicted in  The Swan Gondola,  is a fictional approximation of the “Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” The author’s version of the Omaha World’s Fair was held from June 1 to November 1 of 1898. Its goal was to showcase the development of the entire West, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. Over 2.6 million people came to Omaha to view the 4,062 exhibits during the four months of the Fair. President William McKinley was among the dignitaries who attended. McKinley, in a cameo role here, is immersed in the Spanish-American War, yet still makes time to attend.

Already known as the “New White City,” this fair tries to one-up the fair at Chicago, originally called the “White CIty.” Chicago’s fair took place in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The Omaha Fair is much different from Chicago’s, as there is very little “white” about it. Behind the scenes at the Fair, another story takes place, a sleazier story: that of the “rousties,” those workers who put the fair together and take it down; ZigZag the clown, Rosie the anarchist and friend to Ferriet as well as August, another close friend of our protagonist. August is an eccentric Native American homosexual who has a crush on Ferrit. Also among the fair’s “players” are the ragtime player, the nervous lion tamer, the waltzing dwarves, can-can dancers, hootchy kootchy showgirls, etc. They are all looking to make a buck from the “gillies,” (civilians), legally or illegally. This “carny-like” background really enriches The Swan Gondola.  The author has said in an interview, “As for the genre of carnival fiction – perhaps its appeal rests in the hodgepodge of it all. Our concept of an American carnival brings to mind childhood delights, but also an element of the seedy, the deceptive, and the decidedly adult. A carnival is a bit of a fever dream – it’s all cotton candy and sex, on a dirt lot.”

“The Swan Gondola” is situated on a lagoon on the midway. It is at the gondola that Ferret and Cecily meet and conduct their romance, at least initially. Ferret is obsessed with Cecily from the first moment he sees her. His obsession drives the narrative.

The Swan Gondola is a novel that grabbed me from page one until the very end. The characters are well fleshed-out and complex and the writing is tight – no unnecessary filler. Readers will be ensnared by the offbeat personalities and carried along by the unexpected plot developments. Timothy Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book. It seems that the author is a huge fan of L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” as demonstrated in this tale. A riveting piece of historical fiction from page one to the very end. I highly recommend this novel. It is original and entertaining and gives one a good look at the goings-on at a fair, a carny show or a circus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (February 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perksie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Swan Gondola Nostalgia
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Coffins of Little Hope

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)

“She says nothing but stares hard at her husband. She presses a palm to her jaw, though any attempt to stop the vibration is useless. Put it back, George. Put it back. And then you stay. You’ve got no heart for any of this, anyway.

He takes a deep breath, exhales, then tilts his head back and breathes again as though the oxygen he needs were at a height he can’t quite reach. Closed up like this the house can’t take in the sun’s heat, and whiskey won’t help with the chill of an empty house. George refolds the towel, then picks up the bundle.

I’ll pack the tent, he says. Mildew smell and all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (DEC 31, 2013)

The simple plotting of Larry Watson’s Let Him Go – the quest of Margaret and George Blackridge to reclaim their young grandson, who lives with his mother and rotten-to-the-core stepfather – belies the strong emotional impact of this exquisitely powerful book.

The power sneaks up on the reader when it is least expected – in a snatch of dialogue, a perceptive insight, a small detail that turns everything around. Larry Watson is a master of breathing life into his characters through ordinary conversations and actions that hint at extraordinary revelations that bubble right beneath the surface.

The story takes place in Dalton, North Dakota in 1951 in what some people refer to as the “real America” – a place where people don’t waste words, where hard work and straight talk is respected, and where the people and the land are reliant on each other. Their grown son met with tragedy, and Margaret prevails upon her taciturn husband to travel to Gladstone, Montana to find his namesake Jimmy…a boy who has been caught in the web of his stepfather’s violent Weboy family.

Larry Watson walks a delicate tightrope; what he doesn’t reveal is every bit as meaningful as what he describes. Is the long and tender marriage of Margaret and George more complex than it appears? What were they like as parents to their twins – James, who is now dead, and Janie, who is estranged from them? Does raising Jimmy give them the right to another chance?

Along the way, there are brutal surprises and heartbreaks and words so true they cause the reader to gasp at their validity. Take this, for example: “A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.”

At the end of the day, Let Him Go is about what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth sacrificing for along this rocky road of life. Gutsy, authentic, and downright riveting, it’s a book that succeeds at blurring that thin barrier between fiction and the outside world. Quite simply, it’s hard to believe that these characters are anything but 100% real.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Milkweed Editions (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Larry Watson
EXTRAS:	Book Trailer with excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Orchard

Bibliography:

• In a Dark Time (1980)
• Montana 1948 (1993)
• Justice (1996)*
• White Crosses (1997)
• Laura (1999)
• Orchard (2003)
• Sundown, Yellow Moon (2007)
• American Boy (2011)
• Let Him Go (September 2013)

*Justice is a prequel to Montana 1948

“Nearly pointed out that we are the wetbacks, having swum our horses across the Nueces a century after the Garcias first settled here. But of course I said nothing. He clapped me on the back— his butcher’s hands— and went in to eat more free beef.

People continued to arrive at the house, bringing cakes, roasts, and regrets that they had not been able to reach us in time to help— how brave we were to assault the Mexicans with such a small force.  By that they mean seventy-three against ten. Fifteen if you count the women. Nineteen if you count the children.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (DEC 23, 2013)

There is nothing small about the state of Texas nor is there anything small about this epic masterpiece of a novel, which will surely catapult Philipp Meyer into the ranks of the finest American novelists.

What he has accomplished is sheer magic: he has turned the American dream on its ear and revealed it for what it really is: “soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns.” The most astounding thing is, you don’t know how good it really is until you close the last page and step back and absorb what you have just experienced.

There are three key characters in this book: Colonel Eli McCullough, kidnapped by the Comanche tribe at an early age and forced to navigate the shaky ground between his life as a white settler and his life as a respected adoptee-turned-Comanche warrior…his son, Peter, the moral compass of the story who resorts to self-hatred after the massacre of his Mexican neighbors…and Peter’s granddaughter Jeanne, a savvy oil woman who has profited mightily from the land.

In ways, the three represent a wholeness of the Texas story: the id, the ego, and the superego of history. Philipp Meyer weaves back and forth among their stories and each one is compelling in its own way. Eli’s is sheer adrenalin, a boy-man who is only slightly bothered by the constraints of society or conscience. Jeanne is a girl-woman with a head for the family business in a time and place where women are considered secondary to men.

And Peter, ah, Peter. He is “The Son,” the diarist who sees the moral shadings, who realizes that not all life is a matter of economics, that the strong should not be encouraged while the weak perish, and that we do have choices in our actions. He notes “that the entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement – from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inbred behavior toward learned behavior and acquired knowledge.” He is the heart and soul of Texas.

This American epic focuses on many themes. One is generational change and the progression from an agrarian and cattle-based economy to an oil-based economy. Take these lines:

“Of course there is no doubt that the Indian lives closer to the earth and the natural gods…Unfortunately, there is no more room or that kind of living, Eli. You and my ancestors departed from it the moment they buried a seed in the ground and ceased to wander like other creatures.”

Another is man’s inhumanity to man: the brutal land grab and the dehumanization of those who are considered “not belonging” by every single segment: the Comanches, the Mexicans, and above all, the whites who fight tooth and nail to take more of what’s theirs.

And lastly, and most importantly, it is about the blood that runs through human history with Texas as a microcosm. Mr. Meyer writes, “The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it, the land and people both; the only place like it she’d ever seen was Africa: savannah, perpetual heat and sun, thorns and blinding heat. A place without mercy. The birthplace of humanity.”  This book should be widely-read and talked-about.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 718 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (May 28, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Philipp Meyer
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: American Rust More Texas: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy All the Land to Hold Us by Rick Bass The Crossers by Phillip Caputo

Bibliography:

• American Rust (2009)
• The Son (May 2013)

“He was not the first seeker of treasure upon the landscape, was instead but one more in the continuum of a story begun long ago by far greater desires than his own.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (DEC 23, 2013)

All The Land To Hold Us is an apt title whose protagonist is the land – and it is a strange and powerful land. The harsh desert environment of West Texas is extremely arid, bitter and bleak. This environment shapes much of the novel’s character and the characters’ characters. The area receives much less rainfall than the rest of Texas and the temperature has been known to hit 120ºF in the summer. “An easterner, after making the stage trip and experiencing the danger of Horsehead and the Trans-Pecos country, wrote to friends back home that he now knew where hell was.” The setting also includes Castle Gap and Juan Cordoba Lake, an inland salt lake.

This is also a tale of those who live on the desert’s edge, where riches — oil, water, precious artifacts & love — can all be found and lost again in an instant. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town morality, and love.

The characters in All the World to Hold Us span three generations. Richard is a young and talented geologist who works for a Midland oil company. He is driven by his need to hunt for oil and fossils beneath the earth’s surface and by his love for his girlfriend Clarissa. Clarissa, a beautiful girl from Odessa, dreams of fleeing the broiling sun of the Permian Basin and moving to Hollywood, where she hopes her great beauty will make her a model or a movie star. She slathers on sun screen many times each day to protect her skin so that the harsh sunlight will not mar her beauty. She hunts for fossils, with Richard, in the burning desert. Richard keeps what he collects, but Clarissa sells her million-year-old fossils to museums. As there is no dialogue here and little character development, I really have no idea who Richard and Clarissa are.

Herbert Mix is an elderly one-legged museum owner. He is greedy for gold and anything one might find while looking for it: bones, animal fossils, arrowheads, knife blades, clay pots, wagon wheels, coins, and human skulls, which he values most of all and refuses to sell.

A Depression-era couple Max and Marie Omo, and their two sons, live in another time on this bone-strewn land. Max and his sons make their living by trapping, harvesting, and selling Juan Cordona Lake’s salt. The entire family, Marie, Max’s lonely wife, and their sons, are transformed by their surroundings. The lake water they drink is brackish. The food, not much better. And for Marie, the loneliness of the place is devastating. Marie, like Clarissa, wants out of the harsh life in their desert salt pan home.

“WHENEVER THE SALTCUTTER, Max Omo, encountered bounty in that land of deprivation—be it salt or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love with the salt, without even realizing that was what it was, falling into the clefts between the bounty of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.”

Oddly, in passing, a runaway circus elephant, makes his appearance, as does his Indian trainer. Bizarre – but this incident brings some humor and a bit of sadness to the novel.

Rick Bass paints a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters who populate it….who survive it. They possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it the land. The author’s prose is lyrical and lush, at times poetic. Mr. Bass brings much of his geologist background to the novel; he is the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University.

Bass has won many literary awards.  He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks.  And he was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West. He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction.

I previously read  The Ninemile Wolves and The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness by this same author and I really enjoyed them and respect Mr. Bass as the talented, award-winning writer he is. However, I do not think he is up to par in his latest offering. When I reached page 84 in Book One, (the novel is made up of 3 Books), I found that I was plodding along – simply bored with the characters and storyline. This first third of Bass’ novel is a dense and difficult read. It is all narrative, no dialogue. The point of view is that of an omniscient observer.

When I reached the infamous page 84, an image came to mind. I was in an art gallery, or an art museum, and viewing the work of a famous, much lauded artist. “Objectively,” I recognized the paintings for their worth. I believed that the critics’ and other viewers’ praise was on the money.   “Subjectively,” the work left me cold. It didn’t touch me personally. I thought of an artist, perhaps someone like Jackson Pollack, and know many art lovers who think his paintings are the work of genius…and they might be. While recognizing the greatness of Mr. Pollack’s work, I am untouched by his paintings. So it is with  All The Land To Hold Us. I  appreciate the excellence of the author’s prose and the novelty of the story he tells…but I am not moved by any of this. I have now finished reading the novel and understand, objectively, why so many people would praise it well. However, I am left feeling that the novel has added little to my life, except for the knowledge I acquired reading about the “Land.” I did complete the novel as it improved in Books 2 and 3.

While this one is not a favorite of mine, I do recognize that many people might feel otherwise. And, as I just wrote, the authors writing is outstanding – subjectively and objectively….just a bit dense and slow paced at times.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Rick Bass
EXTRAS:	Daily Beast interview with Rick Bass
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nashville Chrome And another big Texas novel: The Son by Philipp Meyer

Bibliography:

• The Watch: Stories (1989)
• Platte River (1994)
• In the Loyal Mountains: Stories (1997)
• The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997)
• Fiber (1998)
• Where the Sea Used to Be (1998)
• The Hermit’s Story (2003)
• The Diezmo (2005)
• The Blue Horse: Novella (2005)
• Nashville Chrome (2010)
• The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2008)
• All the Land to Hold Us (October 2013)

Non-fiction:

• The Deer Pasture (1985)
• Wild to the Heart (1988)
• Oil Notes (1989)
• Winter: Notes from Montana (1991)
• The Ninemile Wolves (1992)
• The Lost Grizzlies: The Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado (1995)
• The Book of Yaak (1996)
• The New Wolves: The Return of Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest (1998)
• Brown Dog of the Yaak : Essays on Art and Activism (1999)
• Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000)
• The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wild Places (2002)
• Why I Came West (2008)
• Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd, Gwich-‘in Culture, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (2004)
• The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana (2009)
• The Black Rhinos of Namibia: Searching for Survivors of the African Desert (2012)

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Highway Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

Bibliography:

• In Search of Snow (1994)
• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002)
• The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Mr Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2009)
• Into the Beautiful North (2009)
• Queen of America (December 2011)

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

• Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993)
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996)
• Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998)

More Nonfiction:

• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004)

“I’ll tell you what this is, it’s two gallons of shit in a one-gallon bucket.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 17, 2011)

The hardscrabble desert land of New Mexico is the perfect setting for Percival Everett’s new novel, Assumption, mainly because it mirrors the protagonist’s character incredibly well. Ogden Walker is a deputy in the sheriff’s office in the small town of Plata, where he serves after a brief stint in the army. Plata might be where mom Eva Walker lives but Ogden finds her presence not enough of a comfort to overcome his unease with his mixed African American heritage (he is biracial) or his general malaise with what seems to be a dead-end career. He finds it hard to be content hunting for the small fish even if a colleague tells him, “A big fish is fun, I suppose, but so are small ones sometimes. Depends on the water. If I catch a ten-incher in a creek that’s two foot wide, that’s a big fish.”

One day, when an old lady in town is shot dead in her own home, Walker is not sure quite where to begin. His investigations eventually lead him to discover that she might have been part of some hate groups — it’s a hard paradox to serve the very people who might wish you harm. Before this murder is completely resolved, there’s more trouble. The body count rises again, this time through a seemingly unrelated murder on the other end of town.

This incident has Walker chasing down prostitutes in seedy sections of Denver. This mystery snowballs into a third one where a fellow law enforcement agent is shot and again, nobody knows what happened and how. As Everett goes about putting all the pieces together, the writing increasingly reaches a feverish pitch and one wonders if anybody is keeping count as the body count ratchets up easily and steadily. “Warren moved on to the next structure, knowing nothing more than that he was confused,” writes Everett of Ogden’s coworker, Warren Fragua, “More so with each piece of this puzzle, if in fact these were pieces, if in fact this was a puzzle.” That same disorienting sensation works itself on to the pages of this fast-paced novel.

Assumption is full of razor-sharp dialog and Everett does a wonderful job of capturing the gritty landscape but the disparate story threads and sudden detours in the action occasionally make the book trying.

With the twists and turns in the story, the moral of the novel might well be to assume nothing. But it sure feels like Everett goes to great lengths just to make that point. After a while the story is not so much genre-bending as genre-defying. Readers who like their suspense stories resolved well will find Everett’s latest novel frustrating. Even the surprise ending might not help redeem matters in such a case.

On the other hand, readers who love the chase as much as the outcome, will find Assumption entertaining and a fun ride. When one of the characters in the novel points out that the whole mess is “hinky as hell,” they will only be too happy. After all, when it comes to murder mysteries, “hinky” is good.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Percival Everett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Terror of Living by Urban Waite Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Suder (1983)
• Walk Me to the Distance (1985)
• Cutting Lisa (1986)
• The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories (1987)
• For Her Dark Skin (1990)
• Zulus (1990)
• The One That Got Away (1992)
• God’s Country (1994)
• Big Picture: Stories (1996)
• Watershed (1996)
• Frenzy (1997)
• Glyph (1999)
• Erasure (2001)
• Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001)
• American Desert (2004)
• Damned If I Do: Stories (2004)
• Wounded (2005)
• The Water Cure (2007)
• I am Not Sidney Poitier (2009)
• Assumption (October 2011)

“He was standing on a cliff…into a kind of arena enclosing…Spruce Lake…and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  AUG 30, 2011)

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning —- at least, he didn’t know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

“The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully…and any bad thing might come of it.”

And that was the signal incident that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier’s dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson’s story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier’s long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

“…when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth…It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart…”

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson’s ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past—of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Denis Johnson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nobody Move Tree of Smoke

Bibliography:

• Angels (1983)
• Fiskadoro (1985)
• The Stars at Noon (1986)
• Rescitation of a Hanged Man (1991)
• Jesus’s Son: Stories (1992)
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (1997)
• The Name of the World (2000)
• Tree of Smoke (2007)
• Nobody Move (2009)
• Train Dreams (August 2011)

Other:

• The Icongnito Lounge: Poems (1992)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems (1995)
• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (nonfiction) (2001)
• Shoppers: Two Plays (2002)

Movies from Books:

• Jesus’ Son (2003)

“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 Beyond is 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 182 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 (2012)

Stand-alone:

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

“The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 18, 2011)

Odysseus was a legendary and cunning hero on a journey to find home, and lived by his guile. Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter with an epic aim, living by her wits. Siddhartha traveled on a spiritual quest to find himself, and defined the river by its timelessness—always changing, always the same. Now, in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s adventure story, we are introduced to sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, gutsy, feisty survivor who manifests a flawed blend of all three heroes, who lives once and inexorably upon a river.

Raised on the Stark River by throwback hicks (some who are rich) in rural Murrayville, Michigan, Margo can shoot and skin a buck, fish like Papa Hemingway, and fire a bullet clean through a rabbit’s eye. She’s a free spirit, a river sprite, a dog lover, an oarswoman and a woodcutter. Her heroine is Annie Oakley, a renowned figure that she hopes to embody.

A series of incidents in Margo’s young life cause her to run away. Her beloved grandfather dies, and her mother—who never adapted to the river life—abandons the family. At fifteen, Margo is raped by her Uncle Cal, but is more perplexed than traumatized when it happens.

“Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus.”

It takes a year for Margo to comprehend that she was violated; circumstances eventually culminate in a baroque twist on a Mexican standoff–with one dead body, one tip-shot pecker, and one pissed off family. She quits school, grabs her Marlin .22, boards her rowboat, and heads up river with her mother’s address found under her father’s bed. She is determined to reunite with her mother and forge a new life.

Margo likes to hear the water rustle against the rocks; sleep under a canopy of stars; watch the pink dawn of the sky; listen to whip-poor-wills call from the trees; and count blue herons as they wade in the river. But her journey is tangled by an undertow of complications, a ripple effect of the sand and silt and muddiness she brought with her from Murrayville and continues to accumulate. Margo has a ripe sexuality, a flood of pheromones and hormones coursing through the channels of her body like a tidal wave. As she paddles upstream, she bounces from one man to the next, (lying about her age), leaving a wake of misadventures at each stop, with minimal contemplation between disasters. With each imbroglio, she unwittingly tugs at the past, pulling it into the present and future, like floating debris that follows along.

The reader is enticed to root for Margo, but I was turned off by her attraction to losers and drunks and skeptical of extremes in her nature. The commando girl power was redundant—she was a superwoman of courage and resolve, and when it was favorable, she would vulnerably depend on the kindness of strangers, who appeared at convenient times. She also inflicts some irreparable damage to a menacing one-eye-blind man from the recent past—his brute strength was reminiscent of the Cyclops in the Odyssey–and then wipes her hands of it with too much nonchalance.

The adventures lack variety or surprise–Margo’s marvel trick shots often gild the lily, and whatever a grown man can do, she can do better. Her noble relationship with Smoke, an elderly, smelly, chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound hermit with emphysema, is supposed to be the pinnacle of the story, but it reeked of authorial manipulation. Margos’ beneficence is obviously meant to offset her other transgressions, which only calls attention to the incredulity of this relationship. When she climbs in bed (platonically) and sleeps with Smoke as an act of virtuous love, it came off as orchestrated. Smoke ultimately became a plot/story device, rewarding Margo with the right things at the right time.

Despite the obvious flaws, Campbell’s story is a page-turner. Her prose is warm, rollicking, and natural. She conveys a spiritual power to the river and surrounding environs, massaging the narrative with the raw power of nature. Margo is earthy, plucky, and engaging, a passionate heroine with a physical, sensual nature and double-barrel gaze. The loose ends in this story imply that a series is in the works, or a follow-up novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Jo Campbell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: American Salvage

Bibliography:

• Women and Other Animals (1999)
• Q Road (2002)
• American Salvage (April 2009)
• Once Upon a River (July 2011)

“The snow was already creating ridges around me, the high points of my profile forming sculpted edges, but it seemed different, as if the snow was not only changing colors but texture, too. Sand; it was like sand, and as I watched, the wind began to winnow the dunes — and then me along with them. First the shoulder that I’d damaged in Vietnam folded into itself and blew away, my ear, then a leg, a hand, quickly followed by a wrist, a foot. It was all very strange, as if I were watching myself disintegrate into the wind.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew  (JUN 30, 2011)

William Walk Sacred describes the Native American vision quest experience as a time when, “You are presenting yourself before the Great Spirit and saying, ‘Here I am. I am pitiful. I am naked.” “You’re down to the nitty gritty of who you are.” He adds, “You cannot go off the path at that point because you are now owned by the spirits. They watch you continuously. There is no hiding.” This quest to gain spiritual insights and to, in effect, travel to God, can be compared to the allegorical journey taken in Dante’s The Divine Comedy in which a soul moves through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Of course, hell (Inferno) is the most gripping. The ninth circle of Dante’s hell holds those guilty of treachery in an icy prison, with Satan encased waist-high in the center. How fitting then that Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming should find himself in a mountain snow storm with a beat-up copy of Dante’s Inferno, battling the elements, violent men, his own limits of endurance, and mysteries of the mind and spirit — in effect, undergoing his own involuntary vision quest.

Walt begins this arduous journey sitting in a restaurant with four convicts he and Deputy Saizarbitoria (the Basquo) intend to deliver to the feds. Three of the cons are confirmed murderers already, and some black humor serves as table talk as the lawmen keep count of how many times Marcel Popp threatens to kill them. Tension crackles even this early as one wonders whether there will be an escape attempt before they even finish their meal. The suspense builds about when it will happen (the escape) because of course it must for the novel to proceed, yet the reader is still surprised when and how it occurs.

Searching for these desperate escapees who have taken hostages with them onto higher ground, Walt has a head start on other law enforcement and refuses to slow down to let them catch up, fearing that to do so could cost more innocent lives than have already been taken. As he doggedly tracks the men and is able to somewhat winnow down the human odds against him, he faces other (weather-driven) obstacles. He finds himself pinned under a snow vehicle at one point. A ferocious wildfire bears down on him at another. Exhaustion and injuries test the sheriff to the max, and he isn’t sure he is going to survive this search for the most dangerous of the convicts: Shade (yes, Inferno reveals its shades too…). Fortunately, Virgil, a seven-foot Native American who wears a bear skin complete with head, comes to Walt’s aid, providing him with shelter and challenging him to a makeshift game of chess while waiting for the dead of night to pass. Virgil is more than a passing character though. Walt isn’t sure how to tell him that one of Shade’s murders is both the spur for this escape from custody and directly connected to Virgil. During one of the sheriff’s direst intervals, Walt implores Virgil, “…I’m not going to make it — and I need to tell you something.”

Shade is a man driven by his past and the commands of the disembodied. Voices (spirits?) speak to Shade and early on at the restaurant, he tells Walt: “I didn’t have to go to the bathroom but wanted to speak to you alone about the snow and the voices.” He believes the lawman may experience the spirits too and doesn’t want to be the only one who goes through a private, hellish spiritual quest. Indeed, Walt and Virgil seem to flicker in and out of “normal” existence as they unrelentingly tramp on in pursuit of Shade, trading dialogue on their uncertainty about where the line is between life and death. One says to the other, “Well, whichever one of us is dead, we’d better get going. I’d hate to think that the Old Ones went to all the trouble of bringing us back and that we couldn’t get the job done.” Getting the job done will only be possible if Walt can brave everything in his path and hold true to himself when his mind is stripped naked before nature and Reality.

Hell is Empty is described by author Craig Johnson as “the most challenging novel I’ve attempted so far and, like Dante, I would’ve found it difficult to make such an effort without my own guides into the nether regions.” Although this is the seventh Walt Longmire novel, I’ve only had the opportunity to read one other:  Junkyard Dogs, the book published before this one. So, I cannot gauge whether Hell outshines all predecessors. I did think it was the superior read in relation to Dogs. However, the two novels arguably satisfy different literary appetites. While this novel is a meaty existential thriller about a man down to the barest threads of his own consciousness, Dogs is a tale of a group of misfits whose walk on the wrong side of the law causes them to come to bad ends. There is a sense of justice by mishap imposed on dumb but not so malicious meddling. However, intentional criminality creeps in as the catalyst for what goes down. Although this is primarily a review of Hell, I’d like to go into a little detail about Dogs:

The opening has Walt investigating an improbable “accident” revolving around a young woman, Gina Steward, who drove off from home in her car. A car to which her husband, Duane, had tied an old man for “safety” while the old guy was working on the family roof. Naturally, the senior citizen, the “Grampus” of the Stewart clan, went for an unexpected open-air ride, and it was a while before Gina, who didn’t notice her bouncing baggage, could be stopped. Fortunately, Grampus Geo Stewart survived this rough road excursion.

The Stewarts run a junkyard, complete with menacing junkyard dogs, adjacent to a relatively new development of expensive homes, and Ozzie Dobbs Jr. frets about what that does to his inherited investment in the development. On the other hand, Ozzie’s mother and Geo are a cozy, if clandestine, couple (ala Hatfields and McCoys or Romeo and Juliet, take your pick). Pretty soon Walt and his loyal department have two suspicious deaths on their hands and have to tease out the clues. Will Walt and his people find that that the junkyard guard dogs’ ferocity can’t match that of their human masters? Or are the people more victims of society or circumstance than anything else? No especially big revelations about human nature rise to the top, but the plot moves quickly and ends cleverly. It’s a sharp, sometimes laugh-out-loud mystery honing a dark edge to a group of seeming bumblers. It’s tone and subject matter stride along most entertainingly. However its tale is, as mentioned, less weighty than that of Hell is Empty.

Walt Longmire reminds me of Walt Fleming, the Idaho sheriff who stars in a series by Ridley Pierson. Then too, bookshelves abound with crime series in scenic, untamed geographic locations with a main hero, a beloved crew of trusty sidekicks, and, usually, a love interest who is somehow connected to law enforcement too. Craig Johnson is obviously practiced at delivering plots that make putting down the book very undesirable. His protagonist is someone a reader can feel good to be around — which adds a reading comfort level since the stories are told in the first person. Even though they are part of a busy niche, the Walt Longmire mysteries belong toward the front of the queue.

Hell is Empty is Craig Johnson’s effort to stretch his writing abilities. No slouch before, he has done an admirable job. His taut mixture of action and character development is nearly flawless, and his literary dollops enrich the novel. Man versus mountain, man versus man, man versus mind, man versus The Beyond. What could be better?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 53 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (June 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Craig Johnson
EXTRAS:	Hell is Empty: Reading Guide Junkyard Dogs: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Killer Summer by Ridley Pearson Cold Wind by C.J. Box

Bibliography:

Walt Longmire novels:

• The Cold Dish (2005)
• Death Without Company (2006)
• Kindness Goes Unpublished (2007)
• Another Man’s Moccasins (2008)
• The Dark Horse (2009)
• Junkyard Dogs (2010)
• Hell is Empty (2011)
• As the Crow Flies (May 2012)