Heroes of the Frontier in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Aug 05, 2016 Molly rated it liked it

Shelves: borrowed, book-riot-finds, read-in-2016

I am genuinely not sure what to make of this. It kind of has no point? And also no resolution? And the closer it got to the end the more I kept expecting everything to have been a dream. Also I am not sure Eggers has the best grasp on sunrises and sunsets and the workings thereof.

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I'm not sure if it's currently trendy to love Dave Eggers, hate Dave Eggers, or just be over Dave Eggers, but I'm fairly ambivalent towards him. I liked The Circle, which I discovered becaus I am genuinely not sure what to make of this. It kind of has no point? And also no resolution? And the closer it got to the end the more I kept expecting everything to have been a dream. Also I am not sure Eggers has the best grasp on sunrises and sunsets and the workings thereof.

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I'm not sure if it's currently trendy to love Dave Eggers, hate Dave Eggers, or just be over Dave Eggers, but I'm fairly ambivalent towards him. I liked The Circle, which I discovered because the premise sounded fascinating (and it mostly was!), but this is the first book of his I've read since then. I don't know what his "true style" is. This is pretty meandering, and like I said, I'm not quite sure what the point of said meandering was meant to be.

Josie is a dentist, but the end of her marriage and the dissolution of her practice following a lawsuit have her feeling at odds. After her ex calls asking if the kids can come to Florida to visit him and his new wife, she kind of snaps. She flies herself and the kids to Alaska, rents a mobile home, and decides to drive to visit her quasi sister, and also maybe live authentically. Or something. She doesn't have much of a plan, she has the attention span of a gnat, and she's outrageously (view spoiler) paranoid that Carl (the ex) has sent someone after her. Oh, and most of the state of Alaska is aflame because of a drought and some awful wildfires.

It felt paradoxically like there were both too many balls in the air (all of Josie's backstory with her parents could be its own book, plus her weird self-centered guilt about talking a teenager into joining the army, only for him to be killed in action), and not enough of a plot. Josie's clearly on a mission to find herself, selfishly dragging her children along behind her. She has what feels like the same epiphany half a dozen times -- oh, this is where I'm supposed to be. No, wait, THIS is where I'm supposed to be. Just kidding, NOW I KNOW this is where I'm supposed to be. And so on. The whole thing with the musicians made no sense. It's the kind of scene that would probably play well on screen, but it's nearly impossible to get a sense of it on the page, since you can't actually hear any of the music. Plus she drops that particularly life's calling like a hot rock once they have to evacuate.

Towards the end, I actually kept waiting for everything to have been a dream. They keep stumbling into these magical situations -- the wedding reception they spontaneously join, the beautiful river she drunkenly bikes to in the woods, the freaking abandoned silver mine they live in for weeks, the whole thing with the musicians.... I kept thinking there would be some big reveal that she'd been hallucinating. After all, she did get hit by a car in Homer at the beginning. And then the end...(view spoiler)I still think hallucination was the best way to go, and it would have explained Eggers's seeming lack of understanding of how the sunrise and sunset work.

This was the thing that kept irking me. I know that the farther north you get, the days are different. There are parts of Alaska that don't get completely dark at night in the summer. And this seems like the end of summer, since the kids keep asking when they're going back to school. But on one night, it's 8:30 and Josie's feeling the actual sun on her face, then a week or two later, at like 9pm it's too dark to see anything and they have to walk home by candlelight? I kept chalking it up to Josie herself not having the best grasp of time, but it felt less like a deliberate character trait and more like a flaw in the writing. It's weirdly sloppy, because it's not like the timing of day or night have that much effect on the plot.

In the end, I'm torn. I kept wanting to give up on this because it seemed like it would take too much effort to finish and school just started and I'm tired. But I kept with it, and I did enjoy parts of it. Like I said, I would gladly read an entire novel about what went down with Josie's parents and the whole Candyland scandal. I just felt like I should keep reading because we were speeding towards some big reveal and then...not so much. ...more

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