August

Starred review from March 2, 2020
Wink’s accomplished debut novel (after the collection Dog Run Moon) explores the nuances of present-day agricultural life. August grows up on the family dairy farm in Michigan with his divorced parents, shuttling between the “old house” where his mother, Bonnie, lives, and the “new house” built by his father, Dar, with Bonnie’s inheritance. After Dar shacks up with a woman just out of high school, Bonnie moves with August to Bozeman, Mont., where August attends high school and has his heart broken after sleeping with an older woman. He spends summers working for his father in Michigan, and after graduating, August defers college (“something people do to put off actually doing something”) for a position on a Montana cattle ranch. Wink takes an assured, meandering approach to narrating August’s life, as August creeps toward adulthood through a series of minor adventures, such as mending fences, drinking at the local watering hole, and learning how to dance. Wink brilliantly captures the stultifying effects of small-town life and the tension between free-spirited August and those stuck in the Montana “suckhole,” concluding with a stunning, indelible image from August’s rearview mirror. Like a current Jim Harrison, Wink makes irresistable drama out of an individual’s search for identity in landscapes that are by turns romantic and limiting.

April 1, 2020
Wink, author of the short-story collection Dog Run Moon (2016), returns with his first novel, a beguiling coming-of-age tale about an introverted Michigan boy who is uprooted from his family's farm after his parents' divorce and finds himself in Montana living with his mother, an NPR-addicted librarian whose choice of a new home was dictated by seeing Brad Pitt in A River Runs through It ("The way he wears that creel across his chest is just . . . perfect, isn't it?"). Not so perfect is August's life in Montana, as a mostly silent outsider always on the edge of things, figuring that "everyone else was fine and it was just him that couldn't find a way to properly live." But, gradually, the world begins to come together for August, in part due to his work ethic, which serves him well as a hired hand on nearby ranches, and in part to his frequent phone calls with his father, with whom he talks mostly about the weather, though surprising degrees of intimacy lurk beneath the forecasts. A sensitive, extremely well wrought novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)