Broken Field

August 1, 2018
The second novel from Hull (Pale Morning Done, 2005) poignantly depicts a hardscrabble town in northern Montana as seen through a high school hazing scandal.Tom Warner--an outsider recently transplanted to Dumont after a personal tragedy and the divorce that followed--is a highly successful coach of eight-man football, and his team has just completed an undefeated regular season and is looking to the playoffs. In a tiny burg like Dumont, the prospect of a state championship galvanizes everyone, even those with scant interest in sports. But first there's the five-hour drive back to town after their final game. Tom gives his assistant permission to drive home with his bride, and then--sitting up front near the bus driver, the only other adult aboard--he dozes. Meanwhile, in back, a scrawny underclassman is taped nude to a luggage rack and tormented. Such incidents--"boys being boys," townsmen keep insisting--have long been a "tradition," but this one's been recorded on a cheerleader's phone, and the story not only spreads across Dumont, but attracts media attention from away. The book's other point-of-view character is a promising, outgoing student named Josie Frehse, sister of the team's star runner and girlfriend of the quarterback, who is the hazing incident's instigator. Through Hull's nimble, empathetic prose, we see Tom and Josie negotiate the incident's aftermath: the scandal it's ignited and the fault lines--ethnic, romantic, and generational--it's exposed. Toward the end, the novel veers from the quiet psychological subtlety that's distinguished it into splashier, more conventional territory. But that small defect doesn't mar Hull's real achievement in depicting life in a remote, threatened prairie town--and doing so without stooping either to nostalgia or cynicism.A sharp-eyed, often touching portrait of a fractured community and a harshly beautiful landscape.

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September 1, 2018
On a long postgame bus ride across the endless Montana Hi-Line, tired high-school football coach Tom Warner briefly neglects his school's chaperone policy, and his unsupervised players haze a younger teammate. As the town of Dumont divides into two factions?one unwilling to jeopardize a championship season, the other disgusted by the act and unwilling to give the perpetrators a pass?Warner must come to terms with the role the game plays in his own life, empty since the death of his teenage son. Meanwhile, Josie Frehse, the independently minded girlfriend of the bullying star quarterback, ponders her future and her rocky friendship with Mikie LaValle, a half-Blackfeet outsider?a friendship that endangers them both. In a long leap forward from his previous novel, Pale Morning Done? (2005), Hull excels in his depiction of both individuals and small-town dynamics, treating adult and teen concerns with the same thoughtfulness and respect. More than an issue book, more than a sports novel (though the scenes of eight-man football are exhilarating), Broken Field offers quietly intense character studies and a vivid sense of place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)