Helpful Score: 8
This is one of my favorite books of all time. Suppose you are the sheriff of a small town. Suppose your brother, the Golden Boy of the family, has become a doctor who treats the Native Americans on the reservation. And suppose he's accused of molesting the Indian girls...what do you do? Told from the viewpoint of 12-year-old David's point of view, it's a year neither he...nor you...will ever forget. HIGHLY recommended.
Helpful Score: 5
Deceptively simple, this is a powerful novel about families, secrets and justice. It is about how one family is torn apart and yet brought together by their actions and reactions to a crime. Even though it is a short book it has more story in it than a 900 page novel. The characters emotions jump off the page and take firm hold on you. A book I highly recommend.
Helpful Score: 4
I truly liked this book. Well-written without being wordy. The story got started from the first page and I stayed up late to finish it - it was that good. Excellent writing, fascinating characters, a positive reading experience.
Helpful Score: 3
Don't overlook this brilliant, moving, coming-of-age story. Down to the last word, not just the last page, it will surprise and captivate you.
Helpful Score: 1
Very evocative little story of time and place and events which forever change the view of 12-year-old the narrator. It is a tale of love and courage and, of power abused, and of the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice.
Helpful Score: 1
Our book club read this. To me it was just ok. I didn't really find it a good read.
Helpful Score: 1
Nice historical fiction. Short and not so sweet.
Helpful Score: 1
Good story, good writing!
Helpful Score: 1
A touching book about a young boy and family secrets. A beautiful potrayal of life in small towns.
Helpful Score: 1
Great story! A quick, compelling, heart-breaking read.
Helpful Score: 1
Thoroughly engaging read and beautifully written.
Helpful Score: 1
A young Sioux woman tossing with fever on a cot; a father begging his wife for help; a mother standing uncertainly in her kitchen with a 12-gauge shotgun: from these fragments of memory, evoked by the narrator as the novel opens, Watson builds a simple but powerful tale. It is Montana in 1948, and young David Hayden's father, Wesley, is sheriff of their small town--a position he inherited from his domineering father. Wesley is overshadowed by his older brother, Frank, a war hero who is now the town doctor. When Marie, the Sioux woman who works for the Haydens, fall ill, she adamantly resists being examined by Frank. Some probing reveals that Frank has been molesting the Indian women in his care. Wesley's dilemma--should he turn in his own brother?--is intensified when Marie is found dead and David confesses that he saw his uncle near the house before she died. The moral issues, and the consequences of following one's conscience, are made painfully evident here. Watson is to be congratulated for the honesty of his writing and the purity of his prose. Highly recommended.
Helpful Score: 1
This one kicks you in the gut almost immediately and doesn't let up!
Helpful Score: 1
This is a quick read, but very interesting.
Helpful Score: 1
Very interesting, easy to read book. I read it in one sitting. I would recommend this book for adults only, as it centers around adult themes. But is done in an intelligent, non-offensive way.
Great book to listen to on a road trip. The characters are funny and believable, especially the young narrator. It gives a wonderful look at small-town life in an era when things were simple. I especially liked Marie Little Soldier, the Sioux housekeeper, whose secret is at the heart of the story. It is a revelation of love and courage and the terrible choice between family loyalty and justice.
I loved this book. I was drawn into the story immediately. It is the kind of story you find yourself thinking about when you are forced to put the book down to deal with your ordinary life. It is so simply and well written! The story , the characters, the place all come to life. In some ways it reminded me of "TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD". It is just a superbly written, suspenseful story.
Great story that captures the complexities of families and the secrets they keep.
Beautiful and powerfully written. I am giving copies to everyone.
This small book is a treasure - evocative of To Kill A Mockingbird and written in the voice of a young adolescent boy. It doesn't take long to read, but it will stay with me for quite a long time. The prose is spare, precise and haunting. I felt as if I knew the Hayden family at its conclusion.
I'm a new Montana resident and Loved reading about the land and people. It's a great story with 3 dimensional characters.
While this book held my interest I really did not fell it deserved to win any awards. Though it is better than the book written about the earlier times in the charcters lives; it still did not move me to even keep it.
This book won numerous awards and is excellent. I ran across it as a pick in a college course (I am an instructor).
Great characters and emotion. A short, moving story of family, loyalty, place, and justice. Definitely worth reading.
A beautiful little gem of a book; a coming-of-age story set in a tiny Montana town in the years after WWII, when a 12-year-old boy comes to understand that the world is not made up of black and white, that not all adults are infallible, and that sometimes the choice between what is loved and what is right are two very different things.
Fans of Kent Haruf will eat this one up, but anyone who wants to peek inside the human heart will appreciate it.
Fans of Kent Haruf will eat this one up, but anyone who wants to peek inside the human heart will appreciate it.
A mystery in the tradition of "To Kill A Mockingbird"
In the tradition of Wallace Stegner and Norman Maclean,Larry Watson has created a completely new American classic, a remarkable evocation of a time, a place, and more: a story whose pages will not stop turning because the characters will not let them.
great story, wonderfully written
A quick read but powerful,winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.
I don't read much fiction,preferring non-fiction so I was surprised that I didn't have to slog through endless pages of description to get to the meat of this story.
I thought it was great.
I don't read much fiction,preferring non-fiction so I was surprised that I didn't have to slog through endless pages of description to get to the meat of this story.
I thought it was great.
another goody
"This story is as fresh and clear as the trout streams fished by its narrator..As ybuversak ub uts tgenes as it is original in its peculaiarities, MONTANA 1948 is a significant and elegant edition to the fiction of the American West, and to contemporary American ficion in general."
