Heroes of the frontier A novel

Review by New York Times Review

HOW EVERYTHING BECAME WAR AND THE MILITARY BECAME EVERYTHING: Tales From the Pentagon, by Rosa Brooks. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) As a former high-ranking Pentagon official, Brooks was, as she put it, "part of a vast bureaucratic death-dealing enterprise." In her book - equal parts memoir and history - she charts the United States' shift in military strategy, accompanied by an uncomfortable blurring of boundaries between peace and war. THE INSEPARABLES, by Stuart Nadler. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) In this wise and witty novel, three generations of women suffer indignities in a time of increased scrutiny: Henrietta, widowed and desperate to improve her finances, has approved the reissue of the book she wrote decades earlier (and has regretted ever since); her daughter, Oona; and her granddaughter, Lydia, reeling and humiliated after a nude photo of her circulated among her classmates. JACKSON, 1964: And Other Dispatches From Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America, by Calvin Trillin. (Random House, $18.) As a reporter, first for Time and now The New Yorker, Trillin has covered over five decades of the civil rights movement and its aftermath. His book comprises essays and reporting from across the country, standing as a reminder of the progress that has, and has not, been made. THE SUNLIGHT PILGRIMS, by Jenni Fagan. (Hogarth, $16.) At the outset of Fagan's novel, it's 2020 and the residents of a fictional Scottish town are bracing for an unthinkably cold winter. The story centers on three characters: Dylan, a hapless Londoner; a woman, Constance; and her transgendered child, Stella, whose transition depends on getting the hormones she needs. Stella's inner turmoil matches the impending storm; our reviewer, Marisa Silver, praised how "ordinary, even banal, life dramas unfold while the existential noose is tightening." PINPOINT: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, by Greg Milner. (Norton, $16.95.) Milner examines how the Global Positioning System, better known as GPS, soared from its military origins to become a staple of everyday life, with a focus on its success as an engineering and technical marvel. Along with history, Milner looks at practical considerations that spring from knowing our exact location. HEROES OF THE FRONTIER, by Dave Eggers. (Vintage, $16.95.) Fleeing suburban life, a woman brings along her two children on a road trip to Alaska. The children, Ana and Paul, soulful and intelligent, form the novel's emotional core; our reviewer, Barbara Kingsolver, called them "a dynamic duo who command us to pay attention to the objects we find in our path, and stop pretending we already know the drill."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Adept at literary reinvention, Eggers (Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, 2014) steers his ongoing social critique in an especially liberating new direction in this comedic outlaw odyssey. Josie is a dentist in Ohio with two children: somber and kind eight-year-old Paul and tempestuous five-year-old Ana. Josie's useless ex is in Florida, and there is no way she will allow the children to visit. Instead, she takes them to Alaska, renting a rattletrap RV with a vague plan to connect with a woman she refers to as her stepsister. It turns out that wildfires are rampaging the state, and Josie's own blazing fury induces her to take outrageous risks. Over the course of Josie's hilarious and scathing inner monologue about the depravity of our species, Eggers offers glimpses into her molten sorrows, including the death of her favorite patient in Afghanistan and a decimating malpractice lawsuit. As this trio of surprisingly resilient fugitives careens haphazardly from peril to refuge and back again, Eggers, writing with exuberant imagination, incandescent precision, and breathless propulsion, casts divining light on human folly and generosity and the glories and terror of nature. This uproarious quest, this breathless journey from lost to found, this delirious American road-trip saga, is fueled by uncanny insight, revolutionary humor, and profound pleasure in the absurd and the sublime. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers is a sure bet for library holds, and this brilliant, funny, fast-moving novel will catch on quickly.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Reader Lowman's fervent reading highlights the comic pathos of Eggers's latest novel, a character study of a 30-something Josie who has abandoned her failing dental practice and conventional life in Ohio, in search of something she can't exactly define but knows that she needs. Without breaking the flow of the narrative, Lowman gives voice and character to Josie's children, accident-prone five-year-old Ana and precocious eight-year-old Paul. Lowman easily distinguishes the friendly and hostile people the family encounters on their picaresque Alaskan adventures. She makes Josie's irrational, often ditzy decisions ring true: run away from troubles, fly to Alaska (which is as far as she can go without a passport), rent an ancient RV, subject your children to fierce forest fires and periods of fear and hunger, as well as lots of happy encounters with nature and people. In short, give the kids the freedom to grow healthy, smart, and strong. A Knopf hardcover. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In Eggers's (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) latest novel, lead character Josie faces a series of disasters in her personal life. She is trapped in a dead-end relationship with an aimless man, her dental practice closes owing to legal problems, and she feels out a place in small-town Ohio. So Josie, her wise-beyond-his-years son Paul, and wild-child daughter Anna rent a secondhand RV and set out on a cross-country journey, setting their sights on Alaska. During their adventure, they encounter a series of colorful characters and suffer various missteps while avoiding wildfires engulfing the wilderness and someone trying to serve legal papers on Josie. All along, Josie muses on what she sees as the sad state of both contemporary American society and her life. Eggers presents this account of a personal crisis in powerful, vivid prose that paints a stark picture of the Alaskan wilderness and a soul in torment. Rebecca Lowman excellently presents the story. VERDICT A terrific audiobook; recommended to all readers.-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A troubled dentist pulls up stakes and moves herself and her two children to Alaska.Josie, like the heroes of prior Eggers novels A Hologram for the King (2012) and The Circle (2013), is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches. Josie has split from the slacker father of her two children, Ana and Paul; she's tormented by having encouraged a patient to sign up for the Marines who is then killed in action; and a malpractice suit effectively annihilates her practice. The only thing to be done, apparently, is to buy an RV and head from Ohio to southern Alaska, where her "stepsister who was not quite a stepsister" lives. Every romantic notion about heading for the hills is wrecked in short order: the RV is slow and hard to manage, let alone park; every beautiful vista abuts a tourist trap where staples are wildly overpriced; and Josie's stepsister has a cultic relationship with the locals that forbids sticking around. (And that "not a quite a stepsister" situation, once it's explained, is understandably awkward.) Between the novel's title, its episodic structure, and the scenes of rain and wildfire that shape the book's second half, it's clear Eggers means to craft a contemporary epic in which the bad guy is our lack of connection with nature. (Josie's stepsister lives in Homer.) Josie herself is an intermittently poignant and affecting figure, prone to comic musings about writing a musical about her hapless experiences or dourly fixating on a daymare of a bottle breaking across her face. But those details can't compensate for the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story, which doesn't meaningfully develop Josie's character and mainly reduces her children into plot complications. "We are not civilized people," Josie muses. But this novel is an unpersuasive glimpse into our nascent ferality. An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1   There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing good work in the light of day, years of worthwhile labor, and afterward being tired, and content, and surrounded by family and friends, bathed in satisfaction and ready for a deserved rest--sleep or death, it would not matter.   Then there is the happiness of one's personal slum. The happiness of being alone, and tipsy on red wine, in the passenger seat of an ancient recreational vehicle parked somewhere in Alaska's deep south, staring into a scribble of black trees, afraid to go to sleep for fear that at any moment someone will get past the toy lock on the RV door and murder you and your two small children sleeping above.   Josie squinted into the low light of a long summer evening at a rest stop in southern Alaska. She was happy this night, with her pinot, in this RV in the dark, surrounded by unknown woods, and became less afraid with every new sip from her yellow plastic cup. She was content, though she knew this was a fleeting and artificial contentment, she knew this was all wrong--she should not be in Alaska, not like this. She had been a dentist and was no father of her children, an invertebrate, a loose-boweled man named Carl, a man who had told Josie marriage-by-documentation was a sham, the paper superfluous and reductive, had, eighteen months after he'd moved out, found a different woman to marry him. He'd met and now was, improbably, impossibly, marrying some other person, a person from Florida. It was happening in September, and Josie was fully justified in leaving, in disappearing until it was all over. Carl had no idea she had taken the children out of Ohio. Almost out of North America. And he could not know. And what could better grant her invisibility than this, a rolling home, no fixed address, a white RV in a state with a million other wayward travelers, all of them in white RVs? No one could ever find her. She'd contemplated leaving the country altogether, but Ana didn't have a passport and Carl was needed to get one, so that option was out. Alaska was at once the same country but another country, was almost Russia, was almost oblivion, and if Josie left her phone and used only cash--she'd brought three thousand dollars in the kind of velvet bag meant to hold gold coins or magic beans--she was untraceable, untrackable. And she'd been a Girl Scout. She could tie a knot, gut a fish, start a fire. Alaska did not daunt her.   She and the kids had landed in Anchorage earlier that day, a grey day without promise or beauty, but the moment she'd stepped off the plane she found herself inspired. "Okay guys!" she'd said to her exhausted, hungry children. They had never expressed any interest in Alaska, and now here they were. "Here we are!" she'd said, and she'd done a celebratory little march. Neither child smiled.  ....... Excerpted from Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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