The Last Coon Hunter by Joe Crance (Guest Review by Tarren Young)

The Last Coon Hunter

by Joe Crance

Reviewed by Tarren Young

Gosh, it’s hard to know where to start sometimes when reviewing a book. You want to not only do the story justice but the author as well. Sometimes the words flow and other times you have to gather your thoughts, grapple and wonder what the heck just happened when you finished the story. What happened is the fact that I sobbed my way through this story in 8 days.          

I bought Joe Crance’s book The Last Coon Hunter back in December with all kinds of crazy notions that the other pile of local authors I needed to read would be read in the month or shortly thereafter!

This is where we all laugh because I’m a mother! At Christmas! Trying to read! I wonder if that thought even crossed my brain? I don’t think there was any comprehension in that idea at all. Nope. None whatsoever.

But I did run into Joseph one night in late January, and he asked me if I’d read the book yet. Sadly, at that point, I hadn’t even opened it. Sigh. Sometimes I wish I was a faster reader or that I could read two books at one time. But I believe we are meant to read the books we are meant to read at certain times in our lives for a reason. I don’t know why, we just do. I opened the book that night and was immediately drawn into the character’s lives, desperate to know more!

Besides getting the kick in the pants I needed, this story also worked well for our book club theme for February of a historical book with a story set at least 20 years before. The Last Coon Hunter spans the years 1976 to 1993, and fits well into that theme.

I am an active reader and my copy is well loved, with several notations and highlights. Of course a few things could be tightened up here and there, but that is the case with every author. Even J.K. Rowling isn’t perfect! We all have to start somewhere, and Joe Crance started with characters that are real and heartfelt from page one.

I loved every character--well, almost every character--(I won’t spoil it for those who want to read it) from the beginning. Each of them had flaws, which is nice, because no one wants to read about flat, stagnant characters. I really don’t think I could sit and pick a favorite character. It would be like trying to tell me I had to pick a favorite child. There’s no way I could do it.

Besides the characters, I have a very soft spot for the setting of The Last Coon Hunter. Though I did not directly grow up in Painted Post, my paternal grandfather worked at Dresser Rand and my paternal grandmother worked at Corning Glass. Growing up in Tioga County, PA, Painted Post was literally my backyard.

Oddly enough though, The Last Coon Hunter reminded me more of my maternal grandfather than anything. The way the characters talked and interacted with each other, their dialects, brought to mind my maternal grandpa who was born on the homestead, in the holler, in Little Marsh, PA and was a logger with horses all his life.

My grandpa not only talked like the father, Jacob Ernst, in Crance’s book with certain dialects, but was full of life wisdom along the way. And you can bet, the life lessons that my grandpa and Jacob Ernst peppered through life and through The Last Coon Hunter story, could and did make you take a step back and realize just how much truth was in such a short sentence.

I will honestly say that I did not expect to like this book as much as I did, much less fall in love with it. Joe Crance is a natural born storyteller, not many people are, and he has only gotten better from here. His story telling style captured my heart. His characters are still lingering there as he weaves a story much like my own grandpa did. 

What I’m coming to realize is that I will never have the time to hear my grandpa’s stories again, and a healing took place through this book that I did not know I needed, and for that, I am grateful.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel

The book opens with a play in Toronto starring Arthur Leander, who has a heart attack on stage. A member of the audience, Jeevan who is training to be an EMT, jumps onto the stage and performs CPR, but to no avail.

 “The lights changed, the blues and whites of the snowstorm replaced by a fluorescent glare that seemed yellow by comparison. Jeevan worked silently in the margarine light, glancing sometimes at Arthur’s face.”

Mostly, the language in the book worked beautifully. The first chapter is full of literary description, but margarine? That was a shade too far. Not a typical description and it confounded me, made me wince.

The play has ended unceremoniously and all go their separate ways. Jeevan leaves the theater after the paramedics take Arthur away and wanders a bit. His girlfriend had left him behind and he doesn’t really feel like going home to her. “The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let’s-do-something-romantic-because-all –we –do-is-fight…”  

Chapter 2 takes us into the lives of the actors and gives us the lay of the land very sparsely, like a script, as they talk over the loss of Arthur. The last line particularly struck me. “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

In chapter 3, Jeevan gets a call from his friend who works in an ER warning him to flee the flu pandemic in the city. “If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word.” Just the phrasing of that struck me as lovely.

We follow Jeevan a little bit but then he disappears. We meet Arthur’s ex-wives and his one child. We follow a child actor who was in the theater that night but survived the pandemic as part of a traveling symphony. The book shifts between time periods frequently but easily. “Twenty years after the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky.”

Chapter 6 begins with “An incomplete list” of things that don’t exist after the pandemic. It is simple and intense. A couple of comic books play a strangely important role in the book.

An inordinate number of people who knew Arthur seem to survive, considering the sheer number of people who are estimated to have died, something like 99% of the world population. You’d still have around 74 million people but you’d expect them to be more separated. Some of it seems wildly improbable, but I’ve seen far stranger things in real life.

It’s funny, even though you know it’s a book about an incredibly severe flu pandemic, there are some characters you just don’t expect to die. No one is immune. There is one character that I just kept wondering whether he would survive into the later portion. Then one person, you get a mention of how and where she dies, and I’m just shocked. Perhaps because it is a piece of foreshadowing and the events happening at the time weren’t directly related to her death.

We drift in and out amongst these disparate threads, getting a full picture of the people who survived, some of the people who didn’t, but how they affected those that did, over a long span of years. And, in the end, it all comes together in ways I never expected. A fascinating journey. Six degrees of separation? The butterfly effect? We see the connections here, given time. It will keep you wondering until the end.

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.”

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

By Gabrielle Zevin

I find it ever so slightly odd that this novel opens with a character who is, while important to the story, absent for so much of the book. It’s an interesting choice and it lets us meet the main character, A.J. Fikry, through the eyes of someone else, at one of the lowest points in his life. An interesting choice indeed, and this book is not boring - it is full of interesting choices and beautiful writing.

We follow Amelia Loman over to Alice Island, where she is going to pitch the latest books from her company to the book store owner, A.J. Fikry. Amelia tells him that she has taken over for the previous rep, who had died, and A.J. is very rude.

From their first contact you might think A.J. is a real jerk but then the story turns and we see it from A.J.’s perspective. His beloved wife is but a ghost in his dreams, having died in a car accident almost two years before.

“She had been two months pregnant. They hadn’t told anyone yet. There had been disappointments before. Standing in the waiting room outside the morgue, he rather wished they had told people. At least there would have been a brief period of happiness before this longer period of  . . . he did not yet know what to call this.”

The night after Amelia’s first visit, A.J. gets drunk while looking at his first edition book of Tamerlane. When he wakes, the book is gone. He hightails it down to the police station and has an absence seizure while talking to Chief Lambiase. The Chief insists on taking A.J. to the hospital to get checked out.

Later that year, two days before Christmas, A.J. finds a two year old child left in his bookstore. How? Why? By whom? There is a note asking him to care for the little girl. It is a Friday night on an island in the winter so he has to care for her, with a little help from his sister-in-law, for the weekend. They bond. He decides to adopt her.

“A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. It’s completely gotten in the way of his plan to drink himself to death, to drive his business to ruin. The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.”

How Amelia comes back into the story, the truth of the baby’s parentage and how she affects the story, other twists and turns, along with many life and literary observations, make this an interesting and lovely book.

A.J. observes on reading The Luck of Roaring Camp by Bret Harte as a college student and then later in life, “Methinks I have grown soft in my middle age. But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives.”

I did find this book to be slightly uneven. Zevin tried to pack a lot in and it covers a large period of time. There were parts that felt true and made my heart sing so that it deserved a 5 star review, then there was a portion where I thought, "Isn't this over yet?" and planned to leave it at 3 stars. In its entirety, I would have hated to miss this journey. She took some chances and a few of them didn’t work as well as others but, in the end, the cumulative effect was magnificent. It deserves a good 4.5 stars. I would recommend this book to anyone.