This is an extended dream of a novel, set in an Our Town that lies midway between Spoon River and Brigadoon â a place of mist and rains and tides, where animals talk and humans struggle to find that spot between surviving and truly living.
Set in a tiny coastal Oregon village, the plot (such as it is) meanders about following various inhabitants as they work and love and think about the future. The main family is that of Worried Man and his wife, Maple Head, their daughter No Horses, her husband Owen, and their son Daniel. Worried Man, aided and abetted by his friend Cedar, run the Public Works department under a vague mission statement that seems to involve doing whatever they think would be a good idea for the town. The magical-realism tale unspools in multiple languages â English, Gaelic, Italian, Salish, Latin, and Bear, and Doyle brings the landscape to breathing, pulsating life on every page.
Don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy. As the crow says, âstories are not only words. Words are just the clothes people drape on stories.â And a magical drapery it is.
Set in a tiny coastal Oregon village, the plot (such as it is) meanders about following various inhabitants as they work and love and think about the future. The main family is that of Worried Man and his wife, Maple Head, their daughter No Horses, her husband Owen, and their son Daniel. Worried Man, aided and abetted by his friend Cedar, run the Public Works department under a vague mission statement that seems to involve doing whatever they think would be a good idea for the town. The magical-realism tale unspools in multiple languages â English, Gaelic, Italian, Salish, Latin, and Bear, and Doyle brings the landscape to breathing, pulsating life on every page.
Don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy. As the crow says, âstories are not only words. Words are just the clothes people drape on stories.â And a magical drapery it is.
Superb; thought-provoking, like nothing you've read before, it's a tsunami told in slow-lapping water waves of the mind.
Loved this book, partly because I live near the area where the book takes place, along the Oregon coast. Different style of writing, some might not like it but I find it quite lyrical with keen observation into nature and humanity.
