Review by Booklist Review
The complexity of human nature compounded by living with other people is studied through the eyes of a 17-year-old boy caught on the brink of adulthood in the web of his parents' problems. Too young to make the necessary choices or decisions, he rides out the rough weather of his father's job loss, his parents' separation, and their subsequent reunion. A short, tense novel that offers insightful vignettes about the difficulties of growing up. --Cynthia Ogorek
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in Montana, this precisely structured novel owes much to the style and subjects of Ford's praised short-story collection, Rock Springs . For a few days during the fall of 1960, 16-year-old Joe confronts his parents' frailties when his father loses his job and takes off to fight forest fires near the Canadian border while his mother begins an affair with an older man. Looking back on a not-so-simple love triangle from the perspective of adulthood, yet recalling his emotions as a sensitive, confused teenager, Joe's first-person narrative beautifully reveals the melancholy and pain of the spectacle he observed and was compelled to involve himself in--grown-ups who behave like children, children who are forced to act like adults--and displays Ford's remarkable ability to capture distinctive voices. While the complex relationships within families are a common theme in his work--along with the self-destructiveness of those whose lives and loves have gone bad, and the pressing need to live without illusions--his short, bittersweet fourth novel details how family strife is ``nature's way,'' and again proves Ford to be a gifted chronicler of the down-and-out. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Narrated by son Joe, a teenager at the time of the events, this well-written tale takes place in 1960 Montana. Wealthy businessman Warren Miller plays golf with teaching pro Jerry Brinson at a private Great Falls country club. When Jerry loses his job at the club, Miller starts taking swimming lessons from Jerry's wife, Jeanette, at the YWCA. Jerry and Jeanette, a handsome, athletic couple in their late 30s, are both headed for midlife troubles. Seeking to prove his manhood, Jerry joins a firefighting crew battling a blaze in the nearby mountains. Left behind, Jeanette falls into bed with an eager Warren Miller. By the author of A Piece of My Heart (LJ 12/1/76), The Sportswriter , and Rock Springs, this excellent short novel, while gently and reflectively told, is ultimately a devastating account of one family's destruction. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/90.-- James B . Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Readers of Ford's last book, a story collection (Rock Springs, 1987), will orient themselves quickly here--and wonder if maybe this isn't a story that got away from that collection and got puffed up a little. The 16-year. old narrator is living in Great Falls, Montana, in 1960. His father is a golf pro who suddenly finds himself fired for no good reason. A short time later, the father packs up and leaves to fight a raging forest fire in the North that threatens never to go out. Almost as soon as he's gone, the mother takes up with the rich and confident Warren Miller, the owner of two local grain elevators. She takes her son to dinner at Miller's house, and later that night has Miller join her in bed. The son wordlessly discovers them--to his great hurt. Then the father returns, commits an act of ineffectual revenge on Miller, and the story drifts away. Warren Miller has some dimensionality, but then he's the fulcrum here. Son, father, and mother (she especially--with a cynicism and sexual impulsiveness that seem just a tad unaligned, given how Ford first portrays her)--all are the least inflected and most stock of characters, paper dolls that seem most evidently designed to soak up sad truths. In Ford, there are scads: ""'Your life doesn't mean what you have, sweetheart, or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up. That's an old saying, I know. But it's still true. You need to have something to give up. Okay?'"" Or: ""And I understood, just as I sat there in the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was a thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would."" These K-Mart pearls are the kind that country-and-western songs are strung with, and here especially they appear to be the only things Ford's high lonesome sound is after. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
