English Creek by Ivan Doig

[hippywife]

I just finished reading this and was going to post this as reply to my post in the what are you reading this week thread, but I really felt it deserved its own post.

Let me just first say it was excellent! I never would have heard about this book and writer except they were talking on the Diane Rehm show about the second book in this trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, being one of Diane's favorite books of all time. So, I gave it a chance.

Written in 1984, it's historical fiction, my favorite genre. At first I didn't think I was going to like it but it didn't take long for it to suck me right in and keep me there.

It's about a sixty-some year old man reminiscing on the summer of his 15th year growing up in Montana in 1939. His father is a forest ranger in this wide expanse of open country dotted by sheep and cattle farms around the national forest that is his job, and the son of the first Scottish settlers who came to this area of the country. It's about the changes the protagonist sees come to his family and those around them in that one summer where he isn't still a boy, but not quite yet a man. It chronicles well, I think, the lives of the hard scrap folk these far reaches were settled by and the times they found themselves in during the Depression when the west was still the west for the most part.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys this genre, the time and area it's set it, or anyone who just enjoys a good old-fashioned tale. To me it was every bit as engaging as Lonesome Dove, just set in a northerly environ.

I never would have picked this book up on my own but I'm so glad that I did. Now I can't wait to get to the second book in this trilogy, the aforementioned Dancing at the Rascal Fair.

:hi:

[hippywife]

1. As it turns out,

Dancing at the Rascal Fair is a prequel to English Creek. I do love the way the man writes. I'm hearing Scottish brogues in my head as I read, but it's not written in unreadable Scottish dialect. This is going to be a delight, I can tell already.

:hi: