May 27, 2024
In Wilkins’s lovely latest (after Fall Back Down When I Die), a teenage drifter offers a grieving rancher a new lease on life. The year is 1994 and Rene Bouchard, 71, is a recent widower in tiny Delphi, Mont. He’s in the midst of planning his suicide when he discovers that his long-serving ranchhand has been neglecting the sheep and decides to take over. A parallel narrative follows Justin, a waifish 16-year-old from Seattle who runs away from home to escape his abusive uncle. After Justin wanders onto Rene’s land, Rene puts him to work, haunted by how Justin triggers memories of his youngest son Franklin, who was bullied as a teen and who died by suicide. The cast also includes Rene’s married daughter, Lianne, who sticks around after her mother’s funeral to work as a substitute teacher. Despite Lianne’s misgivings about Justin, she accepts her father’s rapport with the teen, though the trio’s stability is threatened by a homophobic neighbor. In flashbacks, Wilkins gradually reveals the depth of the pain carried by each of the characters. It adds up to a bracing story of second chances. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand, Union Literary.
June 1, 2024
In desolate, scenic Montana, this novel of lost souls shows them finding themselves in each other. The ghost of Kurt Cobain pervades Wilkins' story. A broken Seattle family and a brutal uncle have sent 16-year-old Justin on the road to nowhere, looking to get away. A sensitive soul, he idolizes Cobain, looks a lot like him, even sounds like him when he plays his guitar. He feels like a misfit, and when he learns of the Nirvana frontman's suicide, he's devastated. The narrative alternates between Justin's vagabond adventures and the lonely depression of Rene, a rural Montana rancher with strong principles and a body that's breaking down. He's recently lost his wife to cancer after losing a son to suicide. Daughter Lianne, who'd taken time off from teaching at a community college to nurse her mother, feels compelled to stay and look after her dad. She faces her own existential crisis after her husband and sons return home to Spokane. As the novel switches between sections of present ("April, 1994") and past ("Before"), it seems that the stories of all three include secrets they would rather not share. It also seems structurally inevitable that Justin's wanderings will lead him to Rene's ranch. Though some of the thematic parallels seem belabored and peripheral characters veer toward caricature, the novel is emotionally powerful and richly descriptive, rapturous in its evocation of the big skies and vast expanse and the lives that have come to seem so small and empty. As Justin becomes Rene's helper, the boy he's found reminds the rancher of the son he lost. "These past days on the old man's ranch had been enormous as the every-which-way blue of these prairie skies, almost blue and big enough for Justin to forget what he had been running from. Almost." The tale builds with inexorable tension, revealing what has happened, and what could. This is no country for sensitive boys. It's a novel of flight or fight, of finding family and a home and a reason to live.
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Starred review from June 1, 2024
Rene Bouchard is mourning his late wife, Viv, following her valiant fight with cancer. There had been hardships, sacrifices, and tragedy, but they built a successful Montana sheep farm, expanding their ranch to over six thousand acres while raising four children--Lianne, the eldest, then the three boys, Keith, Dennis, and Franklin. Now, none of them live nearby, and Rene is preparing to proactively shuffle off this mortal coil when he is given a new reason to live in the form of Justin, a 16-year-old runaway with his own tragic past. Wilkins (Fall Back Down When I Die, 2019) offers a profound meditation on family and finding one's identity. The prose is lyrical yet economical, like an elder who dispenses nuggets of wisdom with every utterance. The skinny, guitar-playing, earring-wearing Justin bears an uncanny resemblance to his recently deceased hero, Kurt Cobain, and begins to work with Rene on the ranch. Justin has never known love, so helping with the "bum lambs," newborns rejected by their mother, proves to be seismically emotional. Wilkins captures with devastating sensitivity how broken people can mend one another and how acceptance and forgiveness can lead to redemption and love. Cobain wrote, "come as you are, as you were," a simple, plaintive reminder to love others for who they are.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.