the second half of this book (where it finally synced with what the blurb on the back said it was about) was what i really enjoyed, to me it seemed that the "set-up" getting to that point was overly long. the story centers around rusty harry, a 12 year old, who is reunited with (re-claimed by?)h...
I couldn't finish this although I gave it a good one hundred pages. If I didn't know better, I would have said that Ivan Doig didn't write this - it wandered, was disjointed, I had difficulty following whatever plot line there was. The characters didn't grow. I have always counted Doig's works ...
In this timeless survival story, four indentured servants escape their Russian Alaska work camp in a stolen canoe, only to face a harrowing journey down the Pacific Northwest coast. Battling unrelenting high seas and fierce weather from New Archangel, Alaska, to Astoria, Oregon, the men struggle ...
The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Ivan Doig's supple tale of...
This book is one of my all time favorites. It is "poetry of the vernacular". If this story doesn't capture your heart you must be a snobbish city dweller who has no appreciation of America's rural past. The setting is rural Montana in 1909, a one-room grade school, and a family of three young ...
In this prize-winning portrait of a time and place—Montana in the 1930s—that at once inspires and fulfills a longing for an explicable past, Ivan Doig has created one of the most captivating families in American fiction, the McCaskills. The witty and haunting narration, a masterpiece of vernacul...
Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters--and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as Doig would prove ...
One of the best reads I've had in a long time. Touching, brilliantly and vividly descriptive. Ivan Doig's words are textures, fabrics. You are transported through time and place to his memories, his fantastically detailed memories, reaching back to six years old, his mother's tragic early death. ...
as uttered by Sandison came like the opening of a new chapter of myself. As if some turn of plot had sprung loose from the most imaginative of his books there in their wise ranks surrounding us in the circular room and, in the surprise coil of a sterling tale, captured the story line of my existe...
For once, my father's damnation of a ranch was underdone. He could have peppered in a few dozen of the Irish fellow's forlornest cusswords in justice to this one. We had come the hours of distance north from the Smith River Valley and driven onto the ranch during the night. As Dad puzzled through...
THE PUZZLE PIECES were barely settled in the box before Aunt Kate was pulling up across the table from me and had the cards flying as she dealt a stream to each of us and to our absent opponents. Herta and Gerda—even their names sounded mean. Helplessly watching her deliver the valentines, as the...
Not simply an exploration: the exploration, Swan to the home islands of the Haidas, the Queen Charlottes. Swan had tugged at Baird’s sleeve about the topic for ten entire years. Now there was some quick back-and-forthing on money—Swan: Will you kindly allow me to remind you that I have received n...
As I rounded the corner to the library, I saw that the usual line of staff and a few patrons at the door had grown mightily and fanned out like a peacock’s tail, the entire street filled with new faces. For a moment my soul lifted at this surge of literary interest from the citizenry of Butte. Th...