Customer Reviews

After the Floods

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The blurb on the rear cover describes this unusual novel as "magical realism -- southern style and northern style." Although I'm not too familiar with that genre (I'm mainly drawn to history, memoirs and realistic fiction), I ventured into After The Floods while I commuted to and from downtown Detroit everyday this past Winter/Spring. The weather was cold and dry, or cold and wet; the predominant color, grey; and the exterior of the bus always smeared with salt and dirt. The city was suffering economically and mired in a corruption scandal. Very real, and not very magical.

After The Floods was an escape in one sense, to places (New Orleans after the flood, and Cold Beak, Minnesota) where some animals mysteriously speak, where an obese Birdella May Borguson becomes a local hero as she strips at a local restaurant to lose weight, where time is sometimes suspended, and where a whole host of real and unusual people live, love and survive. I loved the characters, and believed in their world, as strange and irrational as it is often portrayed by Henricksen. In that sense, the book is a worthwhile escape. If that's what you look for in a novel, then go for it.

But in another sense, the book made me look around the bus, so to speak, and wonder about some of the strangers on the bus (who really aren't strangers, because I see most of them off and on all the time). And despite the struggles around, the book helped me to see the some of the magic. And I figure that maybe my time on the bus everyday is a real-life suspension of time.

After The Flood is interesting. And add to that, Henricksen's wonderful way with words and keen sense of observation, and you end up with a great read. Here's a small sampling of his prose: "Happiness never comes alone, it always drags a shadow."

"A voice told me that truth and meaning are wanderers, living here and there, sometimes in a church, sometimes in a book, a river, or a person. And as soon as you're sure you know where they are, they're gone and you have become a wanderer too."

"On warm evenings the ice rink at the recreational complex was a meeting place. Birdie, given her pregnancy and her inexperience with skates, stayed indoors sipping coffee, but many of the others I've told you about glided around the oval plane of ice under blue lights as music drifted from the speakers. Few things are more beautiful than snowflakes illuminated by lights beneath the vast darkness, snowflakes descending on children who duck and dodge among adults, forever losing and finding one another as they call 'Marco' and 'Polo.'"

I'm lucky enough to live in a place where I still get to skate at night "beneath the vast darkness" and experience a bit of Henricksen's magical realism right around me. The cicadas are hissing outside as I type, marking another seventeen year cycle of summers. I suspect that most readers will come away with similar connections to this story, and it will evoke long-set-aside memories. If this is magical realism, then I like it. It now has has a distinct place in my library.

After the Floods can be read on at least a couple levels. On one level, it's an engaging story about some folks living their lives after floods in their hometowns, in New Orleans and in the fictional small town of Cold Beak, Minnesota. It is told from several points of view, including an omniscient narrator who can hear crows and dogs talk; an ex-Mayor and town historian of Cold Beak; and one of the main characters, Billy Boichild, whose narration is in the form of emails to God and Sister Ann, a religious radio personality. The first time I read it, I was aware that the narrations wove in and out of each other, that scenes in one narration were also mentioned in scenes from another narration. In the ex-mayor's narrative, a crow drops a rose on a grave. In the omniscient storyteller's narrative, we see the crow dropping the rose and we understand why she does this. It was fun to notice the times the scenes converged among the narratives.

I also noticed that there was another intriguing level to the novel. The theme of religion, or belief, is laced throughout the stories. Billy Boichild brings with him some peculiar beliefs to Cold Beak from New Orleans that he keeps to himself (except in his emails to God and Sister Ann), there is a nefarious cult outside of Cold Beak that plays a role in the novel, and another main character is atheist.

The novel itself is classified as magical realism. Time goes nuts in Cold Beak, birds from all parts of the world show up in Minnesota, and the crows and dogs can talk, but their voices are only heard in the narration of the omniscient storyteller. It's made clear that the animals' abilities to speak only appeared after the flood in New Orleans, and that it was only a temporary ability.

I have never lived through a flood or other major disaster, nor have I had the kinds of losses that characters in this novel have endured. I imagine that one of the ways people get through profound losses is by using magical thinking, whether consciously or not. After the Floods illustrates this magical thinking in an enchanting story. It's a story to be read several times to uncover the layers.

What a treasure is this book !
I received this novel as part of the early review program at LibraryThing.com. My first impression was how beautiful the cover of the book was. I was then struck by the inscription. Mr. Henricksen took the time to check out where his book was going and then to sign my copy. What a nice surprise.
I started reading the book the same evening I received it.....I finished the novel about 24 hrs later. I was immediately drawn into the story. Mr Henrickesn has a wonderful way with the written world, the prose was, in places, beyond beautiful.
I've read the other reviews and the story line has been explained. For me, this is a hard story to pin down. Sometimes I felt like I was reading a beautiful fairy tale, sometimes the story was so profound as to leave me a bit breathless but always the author kept me involved with his characters.
As I read, it was always very evident that this story was in the hands of someone possessing a good sense of humor, a sense of wonder as to the world around us and a good dose of respect for the natural world. The combination led to hours of reading pleasure......I did not want to come to the end of this novel.
A beautiful book . I will recommend this to ALL three of my reading groups. This book almost begs for sharing and discussion.

I will be waiting for more from Bruce Henricksen. I realize this is a small press and the author was responsible for the publication of this novel......Thank Goodness, I say, that it is still possible to do this. I would not want to have missed his effort. To Mr. Henricksen I say, keep up the effort. Anyone reading After The Floods can not help but be touched by the story, the style and the message.
Thank you Bruce Henricksen !

I live in Bruce Henricksen's home city so I may be biased, but to me this is an absolutely terrific novel. It gives us a rich variety of characters, all in recovery mode. I cried in one chapter and laughed until I cried in the next. One of the sites where the drama of healing is staged is the fictional town of Cold Beak, situated on the New Hope River. Fans of Lake Wobegon and readers of Garrison Keillor's new novel, Pontoon Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon, are sure to take a special delight in Cold Beak. In this town, and eslewhere in the book, magial events underline the theme of upheaval in the natural order. This theme is also reflected in the novel's somewhat deconstructed plot, a plot that makes a couple of large geographical leaps and plays some entertaining games with time itself. Nonetheless, it is all easy to follow and a joy to read. Moreover, there are moments of rare lyrical beauty. This book is five stars all the way.

The catastrophe known around the world simply as "Katrina" has inspired a number of novels since it destroyed New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast in August 2005. And novelists, because of their wonderful ability to create believable characters and subplots, probably have done as much to explain what it was really like in New Orleans after the storm as the rest of the media combined.

Now Bruce Henricksen's debut novel, "After the Floods," offers a much different, but no less perceptive, slant on what it is like to survive one of those life-changing events that none of us really expect to witness for ourselves. Henricksen's story, set on both ends of the Mississippi River (New Orleans and the fictional Cold Beak, Minnesota), is a magical one that includes talking dogs, talking crows, a little boy wise way beyond his years, a magical distortion of time itself, and a whole cast of eccentric characters doing quite well for themselves, thank you.

"After the Floods" begins in New Orleans some months after Katrina and immediately introduces the reader to two of its main characters, Ruby and George Corvus, a pair of crows that, like other of God's creatures, have suddenly been gifted with the power of speech. Things are not going very well in New Orleans, but Ruby and George are making the best of things as they observe the comings and goings below them.

Meanwhile, in Cold Beak, Minnesota, where a flood of its own did its best to destroy the little town, folks like Birdella May Borguson are getting on with their own lives. Birdie, a very large woman, decides that its time to lose weight and she convinces the owners of Cold Beak's fancy new supper club to let her perform as a stripper in the room adjacent to the dining area figuring that the exercise will burn lots of calories. Fully-functioning businesses appear on previously vacant lots almost overnight much to the fascination and delight of Cold Beak citizens. Birds by the thousand, some seldom if ever seen before in Cold Beak, descend on the town. And some from New Orleans find their way to Cold Beak, including my two favorite characters, Ruby and George.

"After the Floods" is magical realism at its best, telling its story through other eyes, through the eyes of those who live a different reality than the one we ourselves live. In our world, animals don't talk and buildings don't sprout from vacant lots. In Cold Beak, they do, and they are accepted as elements of the reality of life there.

Bruce Henricksen offers the reader a charming little world that offers hope to us all, hope that it is possible to recover from even the worst of disasters, that life goes on in new ways and in new combinations that might be as good, or even better, than what has been lost. This is not escapist fantasy; it is a serious novel cloaked in the very magic of life itself, a book with a positive message that will have you smiling much of the way.

This entertaining and thoughtful novel begins in post-Katrina New Orleans, offering a bizarre picture of the disorientation that followed the flood. In Henricksen's telling, Mother Nature's confusions were not limited to the hurricane. Nature's goofiness has also given dogs and birds the power of speech, and two crows named George and Ruby provide a running commentary on the humans beneath their perches in trees and power lines. And the hurricane seems to have blown the human protagonist's memory and sanity clean away.

Eventually, George and Ruby migrate to a fictional town in Minnesota that has become a new vacation Mecca in bird culture. Unfortunately, Cold Beak is also recovering from a flood. Nonetheless, the citizens of Cold Beak are a positive and resilient group of survivors. Time speeds up periodically in Cold Beak, allowing the rebuilding of the town to happen in days rather than years. And people find love. A young man who evacuated New Orleans falls for a lovely lady, her son, and even for Minnesota's favorite foods, hot dish and walleye. The over-weight stripper whose floor show helped to jump start the economy loses a few pounds and marries the Vietnam veteran who has admired her from afar. And a widower from Minnesota's depressed Iron Range finds happiness with a divorced lady from Minneapolis. Amid all the fun, serious themes are hit on concerning the behavior of a cult that practices polygamy and child abuse.

This novel celebrates our ability to muddle through and even prevail. The touches of magical realism add to the humor, but ultimately this spiritual comedy is far more than mere entertainment.

Yes, the New Orleans Times-Picayune correctly labeled Bruce Henricksen's book: A spiritual comedy. The author's inventive mind, wit and understanding of human nature allowed me to suspend all belief and most gloriously travel from post Katrina New Orleans to Cold Beak, MN in this mythic tale. He wraps us around odd-ball characters and animals that make the reader laugh and cry. (I looked askance at my own dog quite often while reading.) The author's keen and worthwhile observations we absorb will stay with us and truly makes this a one-of-a-kind gift book.

"After the Floods" reminds me of the "Odd Thomas" series by Dean Koontz. I know I did not get everthing on one read and this will be on our bookshelf so I can enjoy it again.