True North

The stark landscape of North Dakota requires a certain sort of person to survive it and a certain sort of fiction to describe it. True North, a book which can best be described as an American saga, is exactly that sort of fiction. It itself is stark, but surprisingly forgiving of the faults of the characters. There are plenty of terrible people in the book, and plenty of good people who do bad things, and in the end, all you can see is that they are human, trying their best to survive.

Without any specific dates attached to the sections, it was hard at times to follow the narrative and determine who was acting and when. The hints were all there, though, and it only took a few pages into each section before I was fully immersed in the narrative. My one complaint is that at times the narrative eye draws too far back and the prose becomes more poetic than feels fitting for the characters, but even that may be as much a matter of taste as of anything else. On the whole, it is a beautiful, aching book.