The Whistling Season
By Ivan Doig
The Whistling Season is set in the past in rural eastern Montana, and addresses that time and place in distinct, uncluttered prose that carries the full enthusiasm of affection and even love - for the landscape, the characters, and the events of the story - without being sentimental or elegiac. Doig's strengths in this novel are character and language - the latter manifesting itself at a level of old-fashioned high-octane grandeur: the sheer joy of word choices, phrases, sentences, situations and character bubbling up and out, as fecund and nurturing as the dry-land farmscape the story inhabits is raw and arid.