Brian Doyle loves words; big words, small words, fancy words, plain words, exotic words, domesticated words, adjectives, verbs and nouns especially, and because he loves words he piles them up in great juicy heaps of phrases and paragraphs and sentences and pages and whole books and makes delicious stories with them, stories about impossibly possible events and a talking crow who loves football and cares for a nun in her last days, bringing her bits of fish, dusting her room with his wings and getting drunk on wine with her, and people with unusual names, and then he tells us why they have those names because he is a first-rate storyteller who has a story to tell in this book but also digresses into disquisitions on the bicycle and Puccini and Irish lore galore and frequent quotes from Ecclesiastes and William Blake, another writer who burns "always with this hard, gemlike flame," and occasionally interspersed with bursts of Italian or Latin or Gaelic, and all of this with the wonder of a child, the soul of a poet, the compassion of a saint, the pen of an angel, the imagination of an inventor and the wisdom of a sage.
The story he has to tell is about the village of Neawanaka, on the Oregon coast; "on a clear day the Oregon coast is the most beautiful place on earth--clear and crisp and clean, a rich green in the land and a bright blue in the sky, the air fat and salty and bracing, the ocean spreading like a grin," one of those rainy places with not too many people so they all know each other and where may be found "Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries," but mostly it's about people, some of whom call themselves the People, the ones who have been there forever, and then a random collection of garden variety others. The People are the ones with the different names like Worried Man, who can smell pain and trouble and run to fix it, and Maple Head, his wife, who teaches school, and Cedar, a man they fished out of the river too long ago to remember, who has a very big story he doesn't tell, and No Horses, who hit a bad patch in her art work but then it got fixed, her husband, Owen, and their son, Daniel, who goes off a cliff on his bicycle, and Moses, that crow, who tells everyone where to find him and then instructs a she-bear to carry him to safety, and a doctor, a policeman, a very bad man and some young people just finding their way. "There's a story in everything and the more stories I hear the less sad I am." Indeed. And that is only the beginning of the wonders herein. --Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: A real storyteller gets going full speed ahead into an Oregon village filled with extraordinary people, a talking crow, a she-bear who follows instructions, a landscape fragrant with green growing things and a great glowing heart at the center of it all.