Review: An Enjoyable Read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 25, 2013
Having been born and lived most of my life in the far north, I had a special empathy when reading this story. The descriptions of the sights, the sounds and the smells of the subarctic boreal forest brought back vivid memories that many readers might not relate to as I did. One reviewer wrote that she found the descriptions of fly fishing and guns ''too technical''. For me, it was a little bit like reliving my youth.This is the story of Gus, a recently separated and newly unemployed engineer who decides to take the summer off at his wilderness Alaskan property to rethink his life. While building his cabin and hunting and fishing, strange things start to happen.The book is written in the first-person which I found awkward at times. In my opinion, telling the story from a conventional third-person perspective would have made Gus' explanations of these ''technical details'' shorter or perhaps clearer to the reader. It would also have shortened the story and allowed for more action. As is, it was a bit like watching the movie ''The Shining'' - a slow buildup to the action-packed final scenes.While I enjoyed the dialogue and the characters, I found them a bit too stereotypical of what an Alaskan outdoors-man was like forty of fifty years ago. The characters all definitely needed counseling for their non-stop drinking, which grew a bit tedious later on.Many of the Kindle special offers I've read suffer from mediocre or poor endings. This one is an exception. It had a great ending.I would suggest that the write-up on the Amazon product page be rewritten as it contains so many spoilers as to basically tell the story in a couple of paragraphs.