From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Nature is as much a character in this sterling collection of 10 short stories as are any of the oddly off-center but otherwise endearing people who inhabit it. Bass writes with concern about the environment (
Caribou Rising), and that same passion infuses his fiction (
The Hermit's Story). In "Titan" a man recalls an awesome and awful day in his boyhood when freshwater rivers and streams, engorged by sudden heavy rains, surged into the ocean off the Alabama coast, stunning saltwater fish so they could be scooped up by the thousands. The teenage boys of "Pagans" squeeze inside a diving bell to plunge into a river so polluted it bursts into flame; in "Fiber," a former writer and environmental activist gathers deadfall trees and, as the "log fairy," sneaks the best onto the trucks of other wildcat loggers so they'll cut down fewer trees. And in the elegiac title story, a geologist weak from cancer treatments relies on children from a rigidly fundamentalist family for winter wood; they are happy to help, until she teaches them that the Earth is millions of years old. These graceful stories are connected through Bass's invocation of elemental forces, but at the same time each is deliciously distinct.
(Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* Bass draws on his geological expertise to ground his latest collection of stop-in-your-tracks short stories on a bedrock of realism only to have his wild-hearted characters race off to realms surreal and mythic. In "Pagans," three teens use an abandoned construction crane on a polluted river to create art out of junk and test their courage. In "Goats," two friends want to be ranchers, but their calves routinely escape. Bass meshes wit with an elegiac sensibility to capture the dark ambience of a world besieged by rampant desecration and destruction. His jittery and desperate characters struggle with desire, sorrow, and fear; intending to help each other, they are, instead, helpless. Bedeviled men and women are inextricably connected to the land, from the "treacherous shifting Yazoo clay of Mississippi" to the snowy mountains of Montana, the setting for two unforgettable linked tales about a resolute and resourceful woman, modes of survival, and the majestic cycles of existence. Embedded in each paradoxical story is Bass' perception of everything from a rock to an elk, an egret, a woman, and a tree as a precious "carrier of life" on a planet graced with a "topography of spirit." Compassionate and hard-hitting, knowledgeable and transcendent, Bass is essential.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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