The Whistling Season [Paperback]

Ivan Doig (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harcourt (2000)
• ASIN: B000Z9NMSS
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (92 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,786,177 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ivan Doig is the author of ten previous books. Seven are novels, including English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and three are nonfiction, including the highly acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, Doig holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

100 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative, poignant and beautifully written!, January 10, 2007

By 

Snowbrocade (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Whistling Season (Hardcover)

The Whistling Season is an homage to a lost way of life, the homesteading prairie farmers and their children who attended a one-room schoolhouse. This story is told from the perspective of Paul, the eldest and most intellectually gifted son of a recently widowed dry-farmer in Montana. Paul is fortunate to have a father who is well-read and supports the life of the mind. Unfortunately Paul is haunted by dreams and nightmares that leave him perpetually exhausted.

Paul's father, Oliver, and his two brothers are devasted by the death of Paul's mother and struggle to keep the household together with the loss of the essential skills of the homemaker. Hiring a housekeeper, Rose, brings not only cleanliness and harmony to the home, but a new schoolteacher to the community. The school teacher is Rose's brother, Morris. Morris' love of learning and theatrical style inspire the children in the tiny schoolhouse. Ultimately the story turns on how these newcomers fit into and transform this little community.

The strengths of this novel are in its vivid portrayal of prairie life, elegant language and poignant plot. Definitely a novel that leaves me wanting to read more of this author!

48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Warmth in Montana, September 5, 2006

By 

Richard A. Mitchell "Rick Mitchell" (candia, new hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Whistling Season (Hardcover)

This novel is about a motherless family of three boys and a widower in a very small Montana town in 1910. A housekeeper is hired and her brother tags along from Minneapolis to the frontier. There the story begins.

The best way to describe the book may be to tell what it is not. It is not hokey or a father falling-in-love chic romance. Although the narrator is a teenage boy, it is not a coming of age novel. Although there is shadowing of mystery from the beginning, it is not mystery.

So what is it? It is an ode to the single room school house and education. It is a frank telling of a family's year on the Montana frontier. There are relationships explored between the boy and his family, the teacher, the housekeeper and his school mates - friend and foe.

Paul, the narrator, has to face adversity (beyond the death of his mother) in several different ways while maintaining his place in his small and insular world. His most difficult task, however, is to decide what to do with a secret he learns.

The writing is terrific, although the book got off to a slow start. After the first 70 pages, which seemed choppy, I was worried I had picked a dud. From there on the book was captivating. Paul, and almost all of the characters, were extremely likeable with all their foibles and weaknesses exposed. The one pure "bad" guy was tangential and truly wicked.

This is a great read once it started to get going. Both the story(ies) and the characters (especially Morrie, the reluctant teacher) will stay with the reader. It is entertaining and thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A loving lament for a lost era--rough, wild, gentle, wise, June 7, 2007

By 

B. Case "InquiringMind" (Redondo Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Whistling Season (Paperback)

"Whistling Season" by Ivan Doig is a deeply affecting coming-of-age novel set in the dry Montana prairie of 1910. The story is told through the memories of Paul Milliron looking back to one important year in his childhood, when he was 13. The book begins in 1950 when Paul, now Montana State Superintendent of Public Instruction, travels to his hometown of Marias Coulee with the unpleasant task of closing its one and only one-room schoolhouse. He gazes up at the night sky watching Sputnik blink across the stars and knows that a new era has arrived. He is heartbroken because this new era will wipe out all that has come before. There will be no going back.

Doig knows this territory well--it is his own ancestral roots. He has researched it thoroughly and published other successful fiction and nonfiction books set in this period and place. While reading this book, I felt transported back in time--the landscape, the people, the very dust that covered everything--came alive on the page. So do the characters--the singular, bizarre, and clarion-clear characters of the Old West--Doig is, indeed, a master at creating wonderfully authentic people that you really care about.

The story is poignant. Young Paul and his two younger brothers are experiencing the first year of grief following the death of their mother. Oliver Milliron, their father, is understandably overwhelmed with the task of being father, mother, and homesteader. Through the distant Minneapolis newspaper, he sees an ad by a housekeeper. In this manner, the ever-whistling, beautiful Rose Llewellyn comes into their life. She arrives unexpectedly with her brother, Morris Morgan, an eccentric, walking encyclopedia. Events unfold that push Morris toward becoming the town's schoolmaster. Although he has never done anything like that before, teaching seems a task that he was born to. His students flourish under his idiosyncratic and outrageous style. But Rose and Morris hold a secret that Paul eventually uncovers. How he handles that situation delineates young Paul's crossover from child to adult.

The novel is in every way, a loving lament about the passing of uniquely American way of life--the rough, yet magical and free life of Western Montana dry-land farming homesteaders.