Review by Booklist Review
When Wendell Newman was a boy, his father shot and killed a game warden before disappearing for good into Montana's Bull Mountains, becoming in the process a martyr to the local anti-government militia a group the adult Wendell wants nothing to do with. Now a poor but hardworking ranch hand, he is thrust into a parental role when a social worker drops off his jailed sister's nonspeaking son, Rowdy. The boy draws the attention of Gillian Houlton, assistant principal of the local school and the still-grieving wife of the dead warden; when Gillian's daughter Maddy takes an interest in both Wendell and Rowdy, unaware of Wendell's relationship to her father's killer, it's the final link in a deadly chain that inexorably tightens around all of them. In his first novel, short story writer, poet, and memoirist Wilkins (The Mountain and the Fathers, 2013) writes of hardscrabble life on the northern Great Plains with mesmerizing power, creating characters with rich if troubled interior lives who are desperate for agency and haunted by absent fathers. Wendell and Rowdy's slowly blossoming relationship is as lovely and breathtaking as the book's tragic ending is inevitable and devastating. Suffused with a sense of longing, loss, and the desire for change asking deep questions about our place in the landscape and what, if anything, we are owed this is a remarkable and unforgettable first novel.--Keir Graff Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Montana's rugged beauty is poetically evoked in Wilkins's fine debut. The story is divided into three narratives. First, readers meet Wendell Newman, a high school basketball star turned rancher whose family operation is in financial trouble after paying for his late mother's failed surgeries. Things become even more complicated when he is asked to become guardian for his possibly mute, seven-year-old cousin, Rowdy Burns, whose mother has just been arrested for possession of methamphetamines. Next, there is Gillian Houlton, an assistant principal who is having a difficult time raising her teenage daughter, Maddy, after the death of her husband, a game warden who was killed by a rancher. Finally, readers get the written apologia of a man named Verl, who is on the run from the law and hiding out in the mountains. The three stories converge when a militia group, the Bull Mountain Resistance, shows up at Wendell's door just as a deputy sheriff and social worker arrive to check up on Rowdy. Shots are fired, and Wendell is forced to flee into the mountains with Rowdy and Maddy. Though the plot depends on too many coincidences, the novel achieves an undeniable cumulative emotional power as the fates of its memorable characters play out. This is an accomplished first novel, notable in particular for its strong depiction of the timeless landscape of Montana's big sky country. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A heart-rending tale of family, love, and violence in which the "failures of the nation, the failures of myth, met the failures of men."Poet Wilkins' (When We Were Birds, 2016, etc.) politically charged first novel, a "sad riddle of a story," is set primarily in 2009, in rural, poverty-stricken Eastern Montana, with the first legal wolf hunt in decades about to begin. Wilkins crafts a subtle, tightly plotted, and slowly unfolding narrative told through three characters' points of view: Verl Newman, in first person; and his son, Wendell, and a woman named Gillian Houlton in third person. The story begins a dozen years earlier with Verl, who's fled to the Big Dry's cold, deep mountains after shooting and killing a man. He carries his young son Wendell's notebook and writes to him each night: "I imagine you are hearing all kinds of lies and should hear the truth of it from your old dad who made you." In the novel's present day, Wendell, a down-and-out ranch hand who loves to read, takes custody of his incarcerated cousin Lacy's 7-year-old son, Rowdy, who's "developmentally delayed." He grows close to the boy and wants to be the father he never had. Hardworking Gillian is assistant principal and school counselor in the small town of Colter, outside Billings. It was her husband, Kevin, an employee of the Bureau of Land Management, whom Verl killed back in the day. She's doing what she can to help a troubled student whose stepfather leads the right-wing Bull Mountain Resistance and raise her beloved daughter, Maddy, as a single mom. Through these characters, in a prose that can hum gently, then spark like a fire, Wilkins fashions a Western fable which spirals down to a tragic end: "They'll wear each other down to nothing...right down to sulfur, dust, and bone."Following in the literary roots of Montanans Jim Harrison and Rick Bass, Wilkins packs a lot of story and stylistic wallop into this gripping, outstanding novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
