Read November 2023 Recommended for Wisconsinites & mystery fans ★ ★ 1/2 Do I recommend it? Eh, do you live in Wisconsin? Minnesota? Work for a rural police or sheriff department? Then 100%, because there is absolutely something to seeing the people you see in your life reflected in your entertainment. Representation matters, and if you are the kind of solitary hunting-fishing person that lives in a small town and wants a book where people talk a lot like the ones you hear around you, there's a good chance you'll find it here.
"The days of spring in the north country are a reward after what is often a winter of knee-deep snow and bone-chilling cold. While both the human and the non-hibernators of the wildlife world still go about their business during the winter, it is different. Whether you're dressed for it or not, chatting with people you see on the street when it is below zero is challenging and necessarily brief. Often when people part, they say, 'See you in the spring.'"
For the mystery readers, I have to say that the mystery felt somewhat unsatisfying. The protagonist remains obtuse in the beginning, never a good spot to start from. Progress feels a little deux ex machina more than any particular skill or perseverance. Overall pacing was uneven, with the first chapter devoted to recovery from events in the first book, the next chapter an isolated incident, and the actual case not beginning until chapter 5. Extreme detail is given to relatively insignificant quiet moments, but then leaves out further details that could add emotional impact to important scenes. Unsurprisingly, after hints dropped in book one and early in this book, a romance develops, but it could be the most awkward book romance I've read. The mystery itself somewhat evolves into a multi-agency (view spoiler), and while I thought it was sort of interesting to take it that direction, that change interrupts the flow of the mystery.
Actually, this book made me think a great deal what it must be like to try to write a book without a lot of experience. There's a difference, you know, between the language we use for speech, that we use for our professions, and that we use for our entertainment reading. The language in this book still feels a like Nania is developing his voice. He's most lyrical describing the wilderness and wildlife but when it comes to dialogue, his prose is wooden. And that is, no doubt, because he's writing it as he hears it. Are you aware of how boring people's words are? Hugely boring, because so much other information is conveyed elsewhere. But you can't transcribe that as your dialogue and call it done, because no matter what the realism, it won't flow well for the reader. One of those weirdnesses in our mental lives, I suppose. Case in point:
"The storage building was a pole barn. Six by six timbers made up the support frame that held up the roof twelve feet above us. Everything about it said sturdy.
'Nick built this thing to store stuff. He said the workshop was for working on things, not storing things. He wired it but there's no insulation or heat or anything. It's pretty much the way he intended to leave it. He had the whole thing built out of 6x6s because if we got a heavy snow some winter, he didn't want the place falling in. I don't think it would have. It's got a metal roof, and snow slides off when it gets too heavy. But there is a guy over on the Chippewa Flowage, Seamus Ruwall, who collects and restores old wooden boats. After a real heavy wet snow, his building caved in and smashed his boats up pretty good. That building was a 4x4 frame. It didn't hold up and had a shingle roof. The insurance company hired me to clean things up and see if the building could be repaired. After a couple weeks whacking away at it, they decided it was a total loss. We got the boats out, or what was left of them..."
Was that passage germane? Not really. Did it add anything to the story? I'd argue 'no,' beyond the first couple of sentences. The character voice didn't get any further fleshed out by the rest of the story. The story itself didn't add anything to the plot (although I waited to see if it would). It's one of those things that distinguishes a great writer--or even, perhaps a good one--from a more workman-like one.
I'll call it two and a half cheese curds, rounding up for the conservation ethic and the Wisconsin representation. Yeppers, those folks feel real.
No comments:
Post a Comment