WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH

by Howard Frank Mosher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1978

The Saturday Evening Post--at its best--would have been a snug crib for Mosher's short fiction; the stories have a quiet confidence, uncomplex plot, and are set in a beautiful and strange place: Kingdom County, rural upper Vermont. The characters are pithy and determined. Life is lovely and very, very hard. The title novella fleshes out these felicities. Noel Lord, an ex-logger now in his seventies, shares camp upstream with Bangor, his Indian ""housekeeper,"" also old. The land they're on was leased to Noel's father, himself a legendary logger, but now a dam will be built that will flood them out. The dam-builders offer him $5,000, a lot of jack for 1927, but Noel holds out instead for a stand of pines along the mountainside: he wants--and gets--them. He means to cut them down, sell the wood, and use the receipts to take himself and Bangor out to Oregon, where lumbering (so says a magazine he's got) still flourishes in the old style. It doesn't work out, which you instinctively know from the start. But Mosher wraps you so easily into the cranky dignity of these two old heroes that their tenacity and orneriness and foolishness seem natural as plant life. The descriptions, the feel, of the land and water and trees all around is superb; the book appears now and then to be written on bark, captivatingly close to its natural setting. Plain and stately storytelling--eye-poppingly vivid and deeply attractive.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1978

ISBN: 1584653639

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION