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omegan3's review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
stelepami's review against another edition
3.0
This is actually a collection of three novellas, the first of which bears the name of the book. A trifle sex-obsessed, but it's not out of place with the Western feel of the writing. I enjoyed the author's word pictures of the settings and careful observations of details natural and human. The third novella was a little unexpected in its plot, but since I'm used to supernatural beings in my entertainment I didn't mind.
jamiereadthis's review
3.0
“When you lifted the lid a bit the natural world, including ourselves, offered as much darkness in human terms as light. To look at it with any clarity you certainly had to attempt to look at it through the perceptions of a million-plus other species.”
Take what you will from the fact that it’s Jim Harrison who writes a fifteen-year-old girl (Sarah in “The Farmer’s Daughter”) that feels more like myself at fifteen than any teenage girl I’ve read. Scared, solitary, badass, lonesome. She loves The Misfits, the wilderness, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald. She’s camped out in her truck to shoot a rapist and wishes the book she had with her was Elmore Leonard. It’s my language, my compass, and if some of her experiences aren’t my own, her attitudes toward them largely are.
So if that’s what stories are good for, to find ourselves, to glimpse our reflection, then this was at least a little sliver of me. Even the connective tissue to all three stories is Patsy Cline, her version of “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” It may be Montana, it may be Canada, Michigan, and, briefly, Italy, but as the homesick Brown Dog puts it: It was never the state, he thought, but the terrain. This is my terrain.
A high four stars to the title story. Another four for the return of my dear, dim, lecherous, sweet Brown Dog in “Brown Dog Redux,” and a low three for the wolfish “The Games of Night,” although it had my favorite lines.
“I had a disturbing thought, saying to myself, ‘It’s not you or me but us,’ including the dead calf off to the side and the bright blue sky above us.”
Take what you will from the fact that it’s Jim Harrison who writes a fifteen-year-old girl (Sarah in “The Farmer’s Daughter”) that feels more like myself at fifteen than any teenage girl I’ve read. Scared, solitary, badass, lonesome. She loves The Misfits, the wilderness, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald. She’s camped out in her truck to shoot a rapist and wishes the book she had with her was Elmore Leonard. It’s my language, my compass, and if some of her experiences aren’t my own, her attitudes toward them largely are.
So if that’s what stories are good for, to find ourselves, to glimpse our reflection, then this was at least a little sliver of me. Even the connective tissue to all three stories is Patsy Cline, her version of “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” It may be Montana, it may be Canada, Michigan, and, briefly, Italy, but as the homesick Brown Dog puts it: It was never the state, he thought, but the terrain. This is my terrain.
A high four stars to the title story. Another four for the return of my dear, dim, lecherous, sweet Brown Dog in “Brown Dog Redux,” and a low three for the wolfish “The Games of Night,” although it had my favorite lines.
“I had a disturbing thought, saying to myself, ‘It’s not you or me but us,’ including the dead calf off to the side and the bright blue sky above us.”
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