THE FLYING TROUTMANS by MIRIAM TOEWS.
Meet the Troutmans.
Hattie has just been dumped by her boyfriend when she receives a phone call from her eleven-year-old niece. Hattie's sister Min is having a particularly dark episode and Thebes asks Hattie to come and look after her and her brother Logan. By the time Hattie arrives back in Canada, Min is on her way to the psychiatric ward. Suddenly responsible for two children, she realises that she is out of her depth and hatches a plan to find their long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead, she piles Logan and Thebes into the family van and heads south.
- Back Cover Blurb
- First Sentence, Chapter One
My mother scooped me up in her arms and laughed and said I didn't have to worry, really, Min was only a danger, and a slight danger at that, to herself. I hadn't known exactly how that was supposed to be reassuring. I put bubble wrap on the floor around my bed, just in case, so I'd be able to hear it popping if she walked towards me late at night with a butcher knife in her hand.
- Memorable Moment; Page 65
SOURCE ... An Oxford Centre Reading Group read.
READ FOR A CHALLENGE? ... No.
MY THOUGHTS ... Essentially a book I actually rather enjoyed ... I think.
Hmm!
I love well written characters and these characters, complex and deeply felt, are nothing if not that..
My formative years revolving around the wants and needs and all that entailed of a family member (not a sister I hasten to add) with a mental illness until, like Hattie, I too 'ran away/'escaped' (though not to France) only to once again be caught up in the dramas; I related to Hattie and Thebes and (perhaps most of all) to the quiet and introspective Logan who is unwillingly thrust into responsibility at a tender age oh so well.
The author's portrayal of Thebes and Logan admirable. It would have been so easy to depict them as nothing more nor less than the tortured, neglected, damaged teens which in many ways they were and yet instead Toews (which incidentally is pronounced Taves as rhymes with saves) peels back the layers to reveal them as so much more.
Hattie, well, Hattie is a whole other kettle of fish as my nana was want to say.
An interesting but to my mind not always convincing character in the way that her nephew and niece, Logan and Thebes, are. Circumstances see her old before her time and yet at the same never really fully grow-up ... or is she just trying to be the 'cool aunt'? Perhaps but I strongly suspect not.
And yet for me that is probably where my enjoyment of the book began ... and ended.
My (once upon a time) teaching assistant head on I was unbearably frustrated by the lack of quotation marks. The lack of them meaning that the dialogue occasionally ran into the narrative slowing the pace down. My painstakingly mentally adding them making what I felt should have been a relatively quick read feel that much longer.
Falling neatly into the category of 'road trip'. Yes, this is an original and quirky take on a genre that arguably has been done to death BUT (for me anyway) it didn't altogether work in that it felt almost contrived; as though the dialogue, the places, the situations the characters found themselves in became merely a means to an end, propelling the story to what I felt was its rushed and rather disappointing ending.
But then ...
What I felt to be genuinely heartfelt, poignant, full of pathos; I guess, yes, for the most part I actually did rather like this book.
