Uncomplicated and unforced, allowing layers of faith to unfold with a natural grace and wisdom.
A serene, beautiful debut that brings together a busted-up rodeo rider and a teenaged ex-con who help each other heal at a family ranch in the Wild Canadian West.
Joe Willie Wolfchild has been a champion rodeo rider since childhood, but his ride on the infamous bull See Four leaves him so battered and maimed that he is forced to retire. He retreats to his Ojibway grandparents’ Wolf Creek ranch, where he is nursed by his Sioux mother, Johanna. Meanwhile, in a bleak suburb, 15-year-old Aiden Hartley drifts into a dangerous life of gangs, drugs and robbery, spurred by the trauma of seeing his black mother, Claire, beaten up by her white boyfriend. Aiden winds up in jail for two years, during which Claire extricates herself from the abusive boyfriend and starts a new life. When Aiden finishes doing his time, a sympathetic youth detective arranges a recuperative stay for him at Wolf Creek. Closed up within himself, Joe Willie is absorbed in trying to fix an old family truck given to him by his father, while Aiden is cocky and hostile. These two stubborn, wounded souls circle each other warily, drawn closer by Aiden’s startling natural propensity for riding. They come to an agreement: The boy will help Joe Willie fix his truck, and in return, the older man will teach him how to ride a bull—but not until Aiden becomes hardened by cowboy life, which includes punishing hikes up Iron Mountain and an encounter with a bear. And Johanna helps Claire restore her relationship with her son by sharing the healing ways of the Sioux. Wagamese, himself an Ojibway from northwestern Ontario, delineates with skill and dignity these stoical lives shaped by the land of their ancestors.
Uncomplicated and unforced, allowing layers of faith to unfold with a natural grace and wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35926-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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