Amazon.com Review
Young Wade drops into Clark's life like a disobedient Skylab. Wade, a Tlingit boy, is Clark's ex-wife's cousin--hardly a close relation. But the mild-mannered Clark, an Oregonian professor trying to make his way in the East, becomes foster father to Wade by attrition; there is simply no one else to care for the boy. In Craig Lesley's humane and beautifully competent fourth novel,
Storm Riders, no romance is attached to the notion of saving a Native American child. Lesley makes both his heroes ornery and unlovable--and desperately real.
Mysteries accrue around Wade. At the opening of the book, a neighbor girl drowns and he is blamed for the accident. In fact, throughout Wade's time with Clark, violent events crop up, and Lesley has the guts to leave these events unexplained. This deepens our sense of the core mystery of the story: Wade's damaged childhood remains unknowable. A string of therapists toss about theories--abuse, a learning disability, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome--and Lesley (who was foster parent to such a boy for a decade) shows how meaningless such theories are in the face of the day-to-day reality of Wade's difficulties.
As Wade makes his way back to his tribe, Lesley spins his novel outward into a meditation on the way families are made and the way children are lost. A Tlingit elder describes to Clark the mythical "land otters" who make off with Tlingit children. Clark thinks he knows what the old man is talking about, and remarks that the land otters are a good metaphor for drugs and alcohol. "The old man shook his head. 'Sometimes there are real land otters.'" And that's the grace of Lesley's writing: Wade is a metaphor for all endangered children, and at the same time he's his own distinctive story, no more and no less. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
As desolate and lonely as the rural scenery of its setting, Lesley's latest novel examines in deeply moving detail the conflicted love of a single father struggling to raise his adopted, mildly retarded son. Billed as partly autobiographical, this wrenching tale examines eight years in the tormented life of Clark Woods, who adopted Wade, the cousin of Woods's then wife, Payette, as a way of trying to save the marriage. Instead, the difficulties of raising the troubled boy contribute to the couple's breakup. A Native American from Alaska born with fetal alcohol syndrome, Wade tests his new parents' marriage from the start. Payette, frustrated with Wade's erratic development, cannot sustain the all-consuming task of raising her cousin and eventually runs off, leaving Woods, a professor at Two Rivers College in western Oregon. Frightening, violent, possibly psychotic tendencies begin to emerge in Wade's personality, escalating over the years. As a nine-year-old, he is suspected of drowning a toddler in a muddy culvert. Wade denies it, but Woods isn't so sure. Yet Woods stands fiercely behind the boy, whom he is convinced cannot distinguish right from wrong, and whom he is unwilling to abandon to the state system for the mentally ill. At the same time, Woods knows he has to break the bondAthat Wade is suffocating his spirit, sapping all possibility of joy from his life. The two do, however, develop a form of love as profound as it is forlorn in this intense story about loyalty and letting go. Lesley (Winterkill; The Sky Fisherman) captures this poignant, despairing quality of love, rendering quiet scenes as heartbreaking reminders that both Woods and Wade are in for a lifetime of struggles and painful challenges that can only ever be, at best, partially redemptive. Regional author tour. (Feb.)
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