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Summary
Summary
From a great American storyteller, a one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son, rocked by a time of change.
Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an "accident between the sheets" whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine.
Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom's past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty's life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone's vision but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries build toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.
Author Notes
Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana in 1939. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in history from University of Washington. Before becoming an author, he worked as a ranch hand and a journalist.
His non-fiction works include This House of Sky, Winter Brothers, and Heart Earth. His fiction titles include English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Bucking the Sun, The Whistling Season, The Bartender's Tale, and Last Bus to Wisdom. He received several awards including the Western Literature Association's Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award and the Wallace Stegner Award in 2007. He died of multiple myeloma on April 8, 2015 at the age of 75.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The summer of 1960 stretches wide in Doig's highly textured and evocative new novel, which returns to Work Song and The Whistling Season's Two Medicine County, Mont. After living half his life in Phoenix, Ariz., with his aunt, 12-year-old Russell "Rusty" Harry comes back to the tiny town of Gros Ventre to live with his father, Tom, the owner of a popular saloon. Rusty's mother has been gone since she and Tom "split the blanket" 12 years ago. Rusty entertains himself in the cavernous back room, which Tom operates like a pawnshop, taking in all manner of miscellany so sheepherders, ranchers, and others can pay for their drinks. When a local cafe comes under new ownership, 12-year-old Zoe Constantine shows up and soon becomes Rusty's partner in crime in the backroom, listening to the bar through a concealed air vent. It's a summer of change and new arrivals, as Delano Robertson, from Washington, D.C., comes to Gros Ventre to record the "Missing Voices" of America, followed by the mysterious and sultry Proxy Duff and her 21-year-old daughter, Francine, who both claim a special connection to Tom. Filtering the world through Rusty's eyes, Doig gives us a poignant saga of a boy becoming a man alongside a town and a bygone way of life inching into the modern era. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
An easy-paced memory of Americana, childhood, dreams, and reality set in Montana in the late 1950s is revealed through Doig's excellent writing and David Baker's equally high-quality narration. Through the viewpoint of Rusty from ages seven to 12, the reader is introduced to a variety of exotic characters starting with the boy's father, with whom he has had scant contact up to the beginning of the story. As Rusty's only visible parent, Tom Harry, the owner and bartender of the Medicine Lodge, takes over the care and feeding of his son. Baker's crusty interpretation of Tom contrasts wonderfully with Rusty's childlike though not childish voice. -VERDICT As open and simple as the prairie sky, as deep and complicated as the rushing waters of the rivers, this is a book for a multitude of readers. ["Recommended for fans of old-fashioned, big-hearted, feel-good novels," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Riverhead: Penguin hc, LJ 7/12.-Ed.]-J. Sara Paulk, Wythe-Grayson Regional Lib., Independence, VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.