Barton

Loved this book, I found it both profound and moving. Doig's book is as refreshing as a cool breeze on a long hot autumn day. The book doesn't have a cynical 21 century bone in its binding. The boys and father are moral, wise and courageous. It seems that almost every critically acclaimed book written in our times has to teach us how we are all the same. How America is racist, homophobic, misogynistic and/or greedy. It just gets to be so tiresome hearing this droning chant go on and on in modern literature. It is a great pleasure to have book that is both beautiful and wholesome.

This is an odd retelling of Hamlet in Wisconsin on a Dog Farm rather than in Denmark. It is pretty well done, but somewhat overlong it, and a little too wordy. Kudos to the author for an excellent debut novel. Apparently, I was not the only reviewer who felt it was a retelling of the Hamlet because they referenced Hamlet as well. One of the many things this author could have learned from Shakespeare is that "brevity is the soul of wit" and cut the book in half. Still it is well done. Of course, that is just one opinion. I would recommend "The Whistling Season", it has similar pacing and narration but it is a better tale.

The book was well written, but a little over long. The narration by John Lee was exceptional. My main complaint with the book is that the all of the heroic and sympathetic characters attitudes and ideologies were from our time not from Medieval England for me this made the story quite implausible.