Review: I wanted to give Kestrel and Rory more time...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 19, 2013
Harper Fox is a wonderful writer.  Not only does she research her locales, but she recreates them in words that are vivid and painstakingly - yet effortlessly - arranged. Let me just reiterate: Fox is a great writer. A pleasure to read for the mere joy of letting her words flow through your brain."Kestrel's Chance" is a novella, a form that I usually find a bit too thin for the kind of character development Fox is so good at.  But Harper is a woman who knows how to write men that feel like men - not a woman's fantasy of what a man is (or a man's fantasy, for that matter). Kestrel and Rory are alpine rescuers, part of an elite team that is charged with pulling fools off of mountains in the wilds of Scotland. In real life, I never would have met men like this, so it was nice to read about them, their quirks, their unresolved pain.I do wish this had been a longer book - that the winding path to that penultimate mountain adventure had been allowed to unroll at a more leisurely pace. Kestrel's story deserves a slower reveal; their five years as work-mates could easily have been given more of Fox's beautiful embroidery. I admit, Fox condensed the story well - she packs a great deal of emotion and context into the relatively limited parameters of her form. I was surely satisfied with the payoff and caught up in the twists in the plot - but I still came away wishing I'd had more time to get to know all of this.I believe Harper has been working on something bigger concurrently - and perhaps this is like one of Virginia Woolfe's little palate-cleansers, like "Flush" (look it up)...a smaller book to clear her mind while a major project simmers.  The problem is that Fox never makes up characters you don't care about (although you may not like them at first).  So one can't help but feel cheated when it all fades to black and you're not quite ready.Keep 'em coming, Ms. Fox.  I'll be waiting.