The Wagoneer

Hi all. I hope everyone has had a good week. I’m away this weekend reffing a tennis tournament of 14 and 18-year-olds a couple hours north of where we live. It’s pretty exhausting since it goes 10+ hours a day, so I won’t be home until Sunday evening.

Meanwhile my husband is home gardening with the dogs. Here is timid Willow in the wagon doing her part. But what is going on there? Lol. And where is Stella?

It’s hard to believe we’re at the very end of April now. Has spring sprung where you are? We might hit 70 degrees today, but it sure has been windy. I’m completely wind-blown. It’s true that you need so much chapstick in this part of the world, lol. 

Meanwhile  a bit earlier this month the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize was announced and here above are the six novels that made the cut. The prize honors the best in historical fiction each year and is open to novels written in English that were first published in the UK, Ireland, or the Commonwealth during the preceding year (so it’s not American). Just briefly here are when/where the finalists are set:  The Heart in Winter — Butte, Montana in 1891; The Mare — during and after WWII; The Book of Days — during the reign of Henry VIII in 1546; Glorious Exploits — In 412 BC after Athens’s invasion of Syracuse; The Land in Winter — during the Great Freeze that was the winter of 1962-3 in rural England; and The Safekeep — rural Holland, fifteen years after the end of WWII. It seems The Safekeep has made various prize lists this year but will it win? Stay tuned for when the winner is announced on June 12. 

And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of novels I finished lately.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang / Hogarth / 272 pages / 2025

3.7 stars. Holy smokes this novel has a lot of pain in it … in the present and in the past and here, there, and everywhere. Is it in the top 10 of all time? It unloads a decimation. And maybe now was not a good time to listen to the audiobook of it after my own loss as I drove back and forth from the city. What was I thinking? I just didn’t want to lose my place in line to try the writing of this Nobel Prize Literature winner. And I thought it would be a story about a friendship. 

And it is a story of two friends Kyungha and Inseon who gets injured after accidentally cutting her hand and is in the hospital and asks Kyungha to go to her house on Jeju Island to find and save her pet bird. Both women are not doing well … Kyungha, who lives near Seoul, suffers from migraines and is having nightmares … and the first part of the novel is of her traveling to Jeju and getting in a snowstorm there and trying to save the bird. Some of it is hard to know what is real or part of a dream. And it’s a bit confusing, but snow images are nicely descriptive. 

Then the latter half of the novel is more about the brutal massacre that happened on Jeju Island by military forces in 1948-49 and how Inseon’s family was affected by that. It’s more straightforward in its telling than the first part and really lays down a whopper of the brutality … the executions, mass graves, and inability to find remains. The harshness and pain is certainly palpable. And it seems personal and very specific. 

I’m sure it’s good the author explores and excoriates this awful event in history, but it might not have been my time for it. Still the writing in areas is visceral and illuminating. I first read about the Jeju Island massacre in Lisa See’s novel The Island of the Sea Women, which is also quite intense with the trauma. I liked the story about the sea women. Have you read that one? 

Beartooth by Callan Wink / Spiegel & Grau / 256 pages / 2025 

3.5 stars. I know some were pretty high on this novel, but I was expecting more from this story about two brothers in their 20s who are living in a rundown house near the Beartooth Mountains of Montana. Their father died not long ago and they are still messed up about that, and their hippie-ish mother who left them early on has returned. The boys are pretty rough around the edges and are in need of more funds — they’re hunters and loggers looking for a way to make money due to the house having some debt.

Then they meet this dude called the Scott who’s with a girl he calls his daughter … apparently he wears a kilt and once killed a young thief pointblank — and he wants the brothers to do something illegal for him. He wants them to get a secret haul of elk antlers out of Yellowstone National Park, which they end up using a raft for to transport along the river. You’ll have to see what happens … it takes a turn of sorts. And late in the plot it introduces another element that seemed a bit odd or out of place. Maybe the story sort of petered out a bit for me. The momentum of the book goes a bit up and down, but my favorite parts were the action in Yellowstone.

That’s all for now. I think I will save chatting about Charlotte McConagh’s novel Wild Dark Shore, which I just finished, for next time. I’m still thinking it over and need to grab a breath of air after its ending.

What about you — have you read any of these books and if so, what did you think?