The Whistling Season
by Ivan Doig
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ivan DoigEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-05-07
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Harvest Books
Book Reviews of The Whistling Season
Book Review: A Charming Coming-of-Age Story
Summary: 4 Stars
I picked up the novel, "The Whistling Season" by Ivan Doig, at the suggestion of my wife and enjoyed it thoroughly. It is a coming-of-age story told with great charm, taking the reader back to the fall of 1909 in remote Montana. There, Doig introduces the motherless Milliron family, Oliver, the father, and three school-age boys, Paul, the oldest and the story's narrator, Damon, a sports-news scrapbooker, and Toby, a perfectly loveable na?f, all of whom receive their schooling in a small one-room schoolhouse.
Complications begin almost immediately, when, in answer to their ad for a housekeeper, Rose Llewellyn appears accompanied by her erudite brother, Morris Morgan. Oliver is a very busy man, operating a drayage business for the construction of The Big Ditch, an irrigation project, the chairman of the school board, father, cook, and provider for his three boys, and a "dryland" farmer, tending both his own homestead and that of the boys' Aunt Eunice.
Doig keeps a clear focus on these chief characters, but by the book's end, the reader has met a host of engaging characters, Eddie Turley, the school bully and his fearsome father, Brose Turley, who earns his livelihood killing and skinning wolves, the other boys and girls of the one-room schoolhouse, and the dreaded school inspector, Harry Taggart.
Early on, Morris Morgan is appointed to replace Miss Trent, the schoolmarm, who has eloped with Brother Jubal, a traveling evangelist, and much of the story revolves around Morris Morgan's teaching at the schoolhouse and the arrival of Halley's Comet, that once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, the visiting star trailing its glistening tail.
All in all, "The Whistling Season" is a wonderful story of American prairie life peopled by well-drawn, loveable characters, with sufficient intrigue, mystery, and surprise to keep the reader eagerly turning the page until the perfectly worked out conclusion, a splendid book in every way, showing Ivan Doig to be a master of his craft.
Summary of The Whistling Season
"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the ad offering the services of an "A-1 housekeeper" that draws the attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so also begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee, Montana. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the "several kinds of education"-none of them of the textbook variety-Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse.
A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best.
A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best.
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