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All Coyote's Children
Jack and Annie Fallon had been living what seemed the ideal life with their son Riley, spending the school year in Portland, where Jack was a professor of Native American history, and summers at Jack’s family ranch in northeastern Oregon, on land surrounded by the Umatilla Indian Reservation. But a good way of life can disappear almost overnight, as the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla peoples already know. Now the teenage Riley is in rehab, Jack has disappeared without a trace into the remote wilderness, and Annie is recovering from her own hospitalization following a mental health crisis.
Still fragile, a bereft Annie returns to the ranch, where she is befriended by Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor. Leona, as it turns out, has a long connection to the family that even Jack never knew about. At the time of his disappearance, Jack had been grappling with his family’s legacy—with the conflicts and consequences of white settlement of native ground. Three generations before he was born, the family ranch was taken from the Umatilla reservation through the Allotment Act. Jack’s mother died when he was six, but his father’s stern presence still cast a shadow on the land.
“Survival is hard sometimes,” Leona says, but with her help, Annie is able to bring Riley home from rehab and begin the work of healing their small family, learning, season by season, how to go on living without Jack. Leona, Riley’s friends Alex and Mattie, and old neighbors Gus and Audrey become a larger family for Annie as they share the stories that connect them—long-silenced stories from both cultures that could solve the mystery of Jack’s disappearance.
In prose that is lyrical and clear-eyed, All Coyote’s Children weaves an unforgettable tale of cultures and families caught in the inescapable web of who they are and what they have inherited.
Still fragile, a bereft Annie returns to the ranch, where she is befriended by Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor. Leona, as it turns out, has a long connection to the family that even Jack never knew about. At the time of his disappearance, Jack had been grappling with his family’s legacy—with the conflicts and consequences of white settlement of native ground. Three generations before he was born, the family ranch was taken from the Umatilla reservation through the Allotment Act. Jack’s mother died when he was six, but his father’s stern presence still cast a shadow on the land.
“Survival is hard sometimes,” Leona says, but with her help, Annie is able to bring Riley home from rehab and begin the work of healing their small family, learning, season by season, how to go on living without Jack. Leona, Riley’s friends Alex and Mattie, and old neighbors Gus and Audrey become a larger family for Annie as they share the stories that connect them—long-silenced stories from both cultures that could solve the mystery of Jack’s disappearance.
In prose that is lyrical and clear-eyed, All Coyote’s Children weaves an unforgettable tale of cultures and families caught in the inescapable web of who they are and what they have inherited.
- GenresFiction
240 pages, Paperback
Published May 15, 2018
5 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
About the author
Bette Lynch Husted
5 books11 followersBette Lynch Husted lives in Eastern Oregon, the dry side of a notoriously wet state, where she studies T’ai Chi and welcomes Northwest writers to Pendleton’s First Draft Writers’ Series. Her drive to her Portland-area Side Porch Poets workshop group takes her through the Columbia Gorge, where she sees bighorn sheep, bald eagles, coyotes—once, even a mountain goat. She has been a Fishtrap fellow, an Oregon Arts Commission recipient and a finalist for both the Oregon Book Award and the WILLA Award in creative non-fiction. She writes a monthly column, From Here to Anywhere, for the East Oregonian.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 2, 2018
This morning, my husband and I walked a long ways north before turning for home. I had been reading All Coyote's Children last night before we fell asleep and again this morning. Once we were home from our walk I read after breakfast and during the day between doing other things. Some books you don't want to end, but you also cannot bear to set down.
Gorgeous, elegant, heartfelt prose right from the beginning. There is a gradual release of information, of facts in this story of a family in recovery, which I admire a great deal. I appreciate a story that focuses on recovery after the fall rather than the fall itself. Everyone falls. Not everyone gets back up.
This is one of those books you want to hand to people, to friends and loved ones and people you barely know.
There is a reconciliation in these pages, tenderness and glory. I have a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and I just want to sit back down and read it again because "sometimes a piece of story breaks off and rides the wind, and even if you close your eyes you know it's going to find you. You hear it coming."
There is confusion in the beginning, a reflection of Annie Fallon's confusion after the death of her husband. These are loving, flawed, believable people making mistakes, doing the best they know how, messing up sometimes. The complete story of this family is a long time coming and it is revealed in community. Lately I've thought a lot about community. The scientific evidence is mounting that the sort of relationships Husted develops in this novel are what most of us living in the "modern world" are missing. Missing all that connection to history and people and the very land itself might be what is killing us.
This novel provides a powerful reminder of the cure for what ails us.
I would like to see this taught in high schools. The story itself is strong, the history is solid, and the redemption it accomplishes is unique. It is an extraordinary story, a beautiful and important one.
This was not an Advance Reading Copy—I preordered and received my copy four days ago and even though I was rereading something else for school (a book I love), I could barely stand to put this down.
Gorgeous, elegant, heartfelt prose right from the beginning. There is a gradual release of information, of facts in this story of a family in recovery, which I admire a great deal. I appreciate a story that focuses on recovery after the fall rather than the fall itself. Everyone falls. Not everyone gets back up.
This is one of those books you want to hand to people, to friends and loved ones and people you barely know.
There is a reconciliation in these pages, tenderness and glory. I have a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and I just want to sit back down and read it again because "sometimes a piece of story breaks off and rides the wind, and even if you close your eyes you know it's going to find you. You hear it coming."
There is confusion in the beginning, a reflection of Annie Fallon's confusion after the death of her husband. These are loving, flawed, believable people making mistakes, doing the best they know how, messing up sometimes. The complete story of this family is a long time coming and it is revealed in community. Lately I've thought a lot about community. The scientific evidence is mounting that the sort of relationships Husted develops in this novel are what most of us living in the "modern world" are missing. Missing all that connection to history and people and the very land itself might be what is killing us.
This novel provides a powerful reminder of the cure for what ails us.
I would like to see this taught in high schools. The story itself is strong, the history is solid, and the redemption it accomplishes is unique. It is an extraordinary story, a beautiful and important one.
This was not an Advance Reading Copy—I preordered and received my copy four days ago and even though I was rereading something else for school (a book I love), I could barely stand to put this down.
November 6, 2018
Gorgeous and haunting, Husted captures the beauty and pain of North Eastern Oregon in this powerful story of love, loss, and belonging. I knew when I started reading this book it was going to be a deep dive, so I saved it for a day when I had time to turn myself over to it completely. I'm so glad I did. Like all of her work, Husted's storytelling is heartrendingly true - filled with people you recognize and told with such compassion that you can't help but hope they find a way to heal, both themselves and us. The writing is lovely - clear, at times lyrical, always powerful. The characters are strong and easy to relate to, and the action and questions keep the reader turning the pages. The historical additions add layers that make you want to learn more - about the land, the people, and yourself. A wonderful addition to any library and a book I'm looking forward to sharing and re-reading.
July 6, 2018
A quiet and achingly melancholy examination of guilt, grief, and forgiveness, All Coyote's Children relies on the power of story to make sense of Oregon's Native American experience. When Annie's husband goes missing and her son finds himself in trouble, her life is shattered. Excavating the history and the personal stories of her husband's family, Annie tentatively moves toward some kind of healing, and at the same time, she's trying to reconcile her obligations to home and community. Beautifully done, Husted has written an important novel of Native American life, tradition, faith and folklore.
July 8, 2018
When Annie Fallon's husband Jack, a professor of Native American history, disappears without a trace into the wilderness surrounding the family ranch, Annie is left to pick up the pieces. She gets some help from Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor with long but hidden ties to Jack's family.
This exciting new novel is set in eastern Oregon and explores the conflicts between the Native American and ranching cultures of the American West. Husted keeps the dialog flowing, the action moving, and the pages turning.
Bette Lynch Husted is known as a poet and essayist. All Coyote's Children is her first novel.
This exciting new novel is set in eastern Oregon and explores the conflicts between the Native American and ranching cultures of the American West. Husted keeps the dialog flowing, the action moving, and the pages turning.
Bette Lynch Husted is known as a poet and essayist. All Coyote's Children is her first novel.
June 6, 2018
It isn't often when you are pulled into a story with such clarity and power. A bereft wife and son find their way through tragedy and into an extended family on land in the midst of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon. This is Husted's first novel, not her first book - I've admired her writing for many years. Bravo!
November 5, 2020
This book grabbed my heart. Reading it was a journey of excellence. I cared about the characters and felt for their struggles. Much of the story dealt with difficult situations in the present and dark deeds of the past. Yet while pain is not glossed over, Husted also provides the balancing experiences of love, community, and the beauty of the natural world.
February 13, 2019
I wanted to like it more. I thinks it’s me not the book if that make sense.
May 25, 2019
Betty Lynch Husted is a good writer. I found myself admiring her ability to tell a story even as I kept wondering why I was having so much trouble believing her story. I wanted to like it more than I found myself liking it. Which is another way of saying, it's not that I didn't like it, but . . .
Living in Oregon I like reading stories about Oregon. I also look for stories written by people who live in Oregon. It's a fascinating state geographically: part Pacific Northwest with rich forests, verdant valleys and great rivers, and part old west with high desert and canyons right out of an old western movie. I liked the idea that Husted's story placed the Fallon family part time in Portland and the rest of the time in rural central Oregon around Pendleton.
I liked that the story was almost as much about the land as it was the people. Good writers can paint pictures with words that are better than actual pictures, and Husted brought central Oregon to life whenever she took the action outdoors. What good writers also do, like any artist, is stir things up: thoughts, emotions, reflections on life, philosophical questions to be pondered. All of this was present in, All Coyote's Children. So why didn't the story rise to greater heights?
The novel is an emotional juggernaut that centers around misunderstanding and tragedy on both the single family level and the cultural level. Although primarily focused on one extended family, it sensitively touches on the lingering grief resulting from the genocide of indigenous native cultures as pioneers migrated across the great plains of the central United States. This spreading tide of white culture, politely referred to as manifest destiny, took whatever they wanted, eliminating or subjugating anyone not white and not Christian. Forcing a value system and way of life on people who seemed to be doing just fine, and in many ways better, than before the interlopers arrived.
Husted's story meshed the two competing cultures, brought them into focus by creating a cross-cultural family and forging them around friendship and loss. A white rancher with an unspeakable past. His son who feels the weight of the injustice of how the natives have been treated. A woman with a woeful past who marries the son and learns the true value of family. Boys that cross cultures and become brothers as well as friends. Neighbors that are all heart and no judgment. Another with no heart and all judgment.
The story was emotionally ambitious; the message a noble one: we are stronger together. Pain and loss and suffering are eased through sharing. Judgment of others diminishes us, says more about us than those we are judging. Take away the obvious cultural differences between people and we are all basically one family.
So much potential. So many elements that usually appeal to me; but in the end the characters did not move me. Neither lifted my spirit nor touched me on a deep level. It’s not that I didn’t care about them, at the end I didn’t care about them enough.
Living in Oregon I like reading stories about Oregon. I also look for stories written by people who live in Oregon. It's a fascinating state geographically: part Pacific Northwest with rich forests, verdant valleys and great rivers, and part old west with high desert and canyons right out of an old western movie. I liked the idea that Husted's story placed the Fallon family part time in Portland and the rest of the time in rural central Oregon around Pendleton.
I liked that the story was almost as much about the land as it was the people. Good writers can paint pictures with words that are better than actual pictures, and Husted brought central Oregon to life whenever she took the action outdoors. What good writers also do, like any artist, is stir things up: thoughts, emotions, reflections on life, philosophical questions to be pondered. All of this was present in, All Coyote's Children. So why didn't the story rise to greater heights?
The novel is an emotional juggernaut that centers around misunderstanding and tragedy on both the single family level and the cultural level. Although primarily focused on one extended family, it sensitively touches on the lingering grief resulting from the genocide of indigenous native cultures as pioneers migrated across the great plains of the central United States. This spreading tide of white culture, politely referred to as manifest destiny, took whatever they wanted, eliminating or subjugating anyone not white and not Christian. Forcing a value system and way of life on people who seemed to be doing just fine, and in many ways better, than before the interlopers arrived.
Husted's story meshed the two competing cultures, brought them into focus by creating a cross-cultural family and forging them around friendship and loss. A white rancher with an unspeakable past. His son who feels the weight of the injustice of how the natives have been treated. A woman with a woeful past who marries the son and learns the true value of family. Boys that cross cultures and become brothers as well as friends. Neighbors that are all heart and no judgment. Another with no heart and all judgment.
The story was emotionally ambitious; the message a noble one: we are stronger together. Pain and loss and suffering are eased through sharing. Judgment of others diminishes us, says more about us than those we are judging. Take away the obvious cultural differences between people and we are all basically one family.
So much potential. So many elements that usually appeal to me; but in the end the characters did not move me. Neither lifted my spirit nor touched me on a deep level. It’s not that I didn’t care about them, at the end I didn’t care about them enough.
May 2, 2019
I actually wanted to give this a book a higher rating as it contains a compelling story set in northeastern Oregon - a place that has strong emotional and professional connections for me. However as they sometimes say on the television news "there is a lot to unpack in this story" and at times I found it difficult to follow all the connections among the characters both in space in time. I often had to go back and reread parts of the narrative before I could sort things out and make sense of what was happening.
September 28, 2019
This novel requires slow and careful reading, as the present often gets mixed with the past, and backstories with memories that were already memories in the past. Some dialogs seem inconclusive and meanings hidden (until possibly later.) And scenes transition suddenly. However, the story is worth the focused attention. The way present and past keep resolving into each other is fitting for one of the main themes of this book: that the past is a vital part of the present, and the past affects how people behave in the here and now.
The main story revolves around a white family who inherited land that is part of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. Annie Fallon, her husband Jack, and son Riley, lived on the large acreage every summer and helped Jack's father manage the property that had once raised cattle. As the story begins, disaster has struck this quiet normal family of teachers. Jack has disappeared, assumed dead, while trying to rescue Riley, age 15, who had got in trouble, along with his Native American friends. Annie has returned to the small ranch after a nervous breakdown following Jack's sudden loss.
The story is grounded in grief, as is the larger story of the Native American families who are the Fallons' neighbors on the reservation. As Leona, a wise Indian woman tells Annie, "Grief in one hand, joy in the other; all Native people have to live this way." Annie realizes that her own family's story of sudden tragedy is a reflection of the history of the Native Americans whose happiness on their land was brutally interrupted.
This is also a story of belonging and sharing a community with different cultures. All are "Coyote's Children." Annie and Riley are on a search for the truth about what happened to Jack, why he disappeared so suddenly, and whether his last writings for a history of cultures sheds light on his fate. Along with the Fallons, members of the Indian community take part in the search for Jack and solving his mystery. Alex and Mattie are Native teenagers; Alex is Riley's best friend from childhood summers, and Mattie is Riley's true love.
The coyote who appears at the farm from time to time is a metaphor and symbol for themes of life and death, for reconciliation and brotherhood among all who share the land. And I love the ending where a family's dog and the coyote run along together on opposite sides of a dusty road.
The main story revolves around a white family who inherited land that is part of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. Annie Fallon, her husband Jack, and son Riley, lived on the large acreage every summer and helped Jack's father manage the property that had once raised cattle. As the story begins, disaster has struck this quiet normal family of teachers. Jack has disappeared, assumed dead, while trying to rescue Riley, age 15, who had got in trouble, along with his Native American friends. Annie has returned to the small ranch after a nervous breakdown following Jack's sudden loss.
The story is grounded in grief, as is the larger story of the Native American families who are the Fallons' neighbors on the reservation. As Leona, a wise Indian woman tells Annie, "Grief in one hand, joy in the other; all Native people have to live this way." Annie realizes that her own family's story of sudden tragedy is a reflection of the history of the Native Americans whose happiness on their land was brutally interrupted.
This is also a story of belonging and sharing a community with different cultures. All are "Coyote's Children." Annie and Riley are on a search for the truth about what happened to Jack, why he disappeared so suddenly, and whether his last writings for a history of cultures sheds light on his fate. Along with the Fallons, members of the Indian community take part in the search for Jack and solving his mystery. Alex and Mattie are Native teenagers; Alex is Riley's best friend from childhood summers, and Mattie is Riley's true love.
The coyote who appears at the farm from time to time is a metaphor and symbol for themes of life and death, for reconciliation and brotherhood among all who share the land. And I love the ending where a family's dog and the coyote run along together on opposite sides of a dusty road.
December 27, 2018
This novel with a wonderful use of language tells the story of a family that has had a wonderful life until the son's car hits a neighbor's bull and all sorts of consequences follow. The past nudges the present in everyone's life as characters seek answers to seemingly unanswerable questions. No one in the book seems to have escaped some traumatic event in the past, but all are trying to cope as best they can. Touching on adult assumptions about kids, the meeting of the dominant culture and Native Americans, loss and closure, hard work, the wilderness, and so much more this book has a lot of depth to it. I especially appreciated the glimpse of the Umatilla culture and its past and present relationship with Caucasian America. One comes to understand that we all have a story and can never know another's complete story, but the pieces fit into a whole. We are all Coyote's children. My complaint about this book is that it veered from one time period to another, sometimes from one person to another quite abruptly so that the reader becomes confused at times. However, these bits and pieces seem to me the best way to put the whole together. Also, quotation marks exist for a reason, and the author didn't use them. More confusion!
July 2, 2020
When Annie Fallon's husband Jack, a professor of Native American history, disappears without a trace into the wilderness surrounding the family ranch, Annie is left to pick up the pieces. She gets some help from Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor with long but hidden ties to Jack's family.
This exciting new novel is set in eastern Oregon and explores the conflicts between the Native American and ranching cultures of the American West. Husted keeps the dialog flowing, the action moving, and the pages turning.
Bette Lynch Husted is known as a poet and essayist. All Coyote's Children is her first novel.
This exciting new novel is set in eastern Oregon and explores the conflicts between the Native American and ranching cultures of the American West. Husted keeps the dialog flowing, the action moving, and the pages turning.
Bette Lynch Husted is known as a poet and essayist. All Coyote's Children is her first novel.
July 27, 2021
This book was a complete slog. Tons of unrealistic dialogue that goes nowhere. How many rhetorical questions do you need to build suspense? Or unfinished sentences. “Show, don’t tell” comes to mind. If you find yourself halfway through and just want to know what happened, everything is revealed in the last three chapters. Literally everything you need to know. The rest is just blah blah blah to make a novel-length book. Read something by a native author instead of this (Beth Piatote, for example).
December 15, 2018
A beautiful book. Loss, suffering, community. Brings the area to life. And tells a story of the differences that bring them all together, despite those who want to use those differences to tear apart. Of the pain and suffering caused by that hatred and the lack of empathy for others. One of those books that will stay with you.
April 14, 2020
I love the interweaving of the story and the setting. I once lived for ten years an hour away from the setting for this book. The history of the Native Americans and their culture interwoven too is well done. I really connected with Annie, the protagonist, and her family as well as Leona and Mattie. There is so much to learn about the area and the Native American culture.
September 21, 2019
A very good NE Oregon writer. I would rate this a 3.5. I loved the characters and the mix of native and white cultures as well as the apt descriptions of our local landscape. But I wasn't wild about the ending.
August 13, 2019
There were things I really liked about this book, but Jack’s disappearance seemed so inconsistent that it kind of ruined it for me.
November 20, 2025
decent writer! grabbed b/c it was taking place in PNW but the story was a little unbelievable for me.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews