Peace Like a River
To the list of great American child narrators that includes Huck Finn  and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube" Land, the asthmatic 11-year-old  boy at the center of Leif Enger's remarkable first novel,Peace Like a  River. Rube recalls the events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa  1962, in a voice that perfectly captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the  northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how  it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty.In the winter of his 11th year, two schoolyard bullies break into the Lands'  house, and Rube's big brother Davy guns them down with a Winchester. Shortly  after his arrest, Davy breaks out of jail and goes on the lam. Swede is Rube's  younger sister, a precocious writer who crafts rhymed epics of romantic Western  outlawry. Shortly after Davy's escape, Rube, Swede, and their father, a widowed  school custodian, hit the road too, swerving this way and that across Minnesota  and North Dakota, determined to find their lost outlaw Davy. In the end it's not  Rube who haunts the reader's imagination, it's his father, torn between love for  his outlaw son and the duty to do the right, honest thing. Enger finds something  quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of America's heartland.Peace Like a Riveropens up a new chapter in Midwestern literature.--Claire Dederer--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.