Ivan Doig
From a great American storyteller, a one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son,Â rocked by a time of change. , Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The MedicineÂ Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of theÂ town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom alsoÂ has a son named Rusty, an â€œaccident between theÂ sheetsâ€ whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the barÂ their true home, but they manage just fine.Â , Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty Â turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in theÂ person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when,Â and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, asÂ Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her andÂ Tomâ€™s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettlingÂ gust of the future, upending every certainty inÂ Rustyâ€™s life and generating a mist of passion andÂ pretense that seems to obscure everyoneâ€™s visionÂ but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher theÂ oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries buildÂ toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully capturesÂ how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.
Fiction,Historical,Historical Fiction,Young Adult,Coming Of Age,Westerns,Literary Fiction,Adult Fiction,Historical,Novels,Adult,Contemporary
The Bartender's Tale