Summary: The inhabitants of Ishawooa, Wyoming have enough to contend with on a daily basis, from runaway children to Lou Gehrig's disease, even before a teenager is found dead in a meth lab and motorcycle rallies and rodeos fill the tiny local jail.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Using several of the characters from his two award-winning novels, The Fruit of Stone (2002) and An Unfinished Life (2004), Spragg returns to high-country Wyoming and the struggles of a group of self-reliant individuals to come to terms with their vulnerability and need for connection. Einar, the cranky but tenderhearted horse rancher from An Unfinished Life, has suffered a stroke and is being cared for by Griff, who hopes to move to Chicago to study sculpture. Meanwhile, McEban, another hard-bitten rancher, who lost the love of his life in The Fruit of Stone, faces more loss, when the wandering father of McEban's 10-year-old ward decides he wants back into his son's life. And Crane, the local sheriff, now married unhappily to Griff's alcoholic mother, faces what could be the onset of the same disease that killed his grandfather. A summary of so much angst sounds almost soap operatic, but Spragg's novel is anything but that. It's about the way ordinary people endure life's crushing defeats with stoic forbearance, but also how they deal with the isolation their pinched stoicism brings. "I wish I would've said something like that out loud," McEban says at one point, speaking for all the characters whose silence is both eloquent and tragic. With its many subplots, this novel lacks some of the narrative power of Spragg's earlier work, but it has moments of lyrical beauty, emotional depth, and crisp clarity that make it essential reading for anyone interested in the literature of the West. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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