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The Flying Troutmans: A Novel
Current price:
$16.95
Publication Date: February 12th, 2019
Publisher:
Counterpoint
ISBN:
9781640091467
Pages:
288
Is it OK to laugh out loud at the misadventures of an earnest but clueless aunt steaming ahead on a road trip with her niece and nephew in a quest to rescue them from their mentally unstable mother and to track down their long-absent father? These are characters with a great sense of humor, and, so, I decided the answer was 'yes.' Miriam Toews mines the darkly comic while exposing the poignant truths in family relationships.
October 2008 Indie Next List
Is it OK to laugh out loud at the misadventures of an earnest but clueless aunt steaming ahead on a road trip with her niece and nephew in a quest to rescue them from their mentally unstable mother and to track down their long-absent father? These are characters with a great sense of humor, and, so, I decided the answer was 'yes.' Miriam Toews mines the darkly comic while exposing the poignant truths in family relationships.
Indie Next List Highlights 2008
Description
"This saga of bad luck and good company is a wry, scary, heartfelt ode to the traverses we have to make in life when we're at the end of our rope and there's no net below us." —ELLE
From the author of Women Talking—now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley
When Hattie's moody boyfriend dumps her in Paris, she returns home to find that her sister Min is in the psych ward again. Freaked out by the prospect of becoming a surrogate mother to Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, Hattie decides to take them in the family van to find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art gallery in South Dakota. What ensues is a remarkable journey across America, as aunt and kids—through chaos as diverse as their personalities—discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.
Praise for The Flying Troutmans: A Novel
"This saga of bad luck and good company is a wry, scary, heartfelt ode to the traverses we have to make in life when we're at the end of our rope and there's no net below us." —Elle
"A lovably nutty cast." —Publishers Weekly
"Not since Stephen Leacock have our neighbors to the north given us a writer as witty and wise as Miriam Toews . . . She is out to entertain with words, and the tale of the flying Troutmans is her best entertainment yet." —Los Angeles Times
"Toews excels here at comedic sophistication, all while masterfully embedding explorations of madness, truth, and the immense sorrow that comes from caring for someone who is derailed by mania's devious tug." —Booklist
"Miriam Toews saunters along the line between comedy and grief as if she might lose her balance at any moment. But she never does. The precarious tone of her novels about fractured families is the crafted effect of a nimble writer . . . Toews is a genius at recording the everyday weirdness of young people, their capricious vacillation between screw–you sarcasm and tender pleading for affirmation." —Washington Post
"Engaging, humorous, grim, and redemptive, this is essential reading." —Library Journal
