“Correcting the Landscape,” by Marjorie Kowalski Cole (HarperCollins, 229 pages, $23.95)
A recipient of the Barbara Kingsolver Bellwether Prize given for work of socially and politically engaged fiction, “Correcting the Landscape” concerns the preservation of the history and natural beauty of an Alaskan town.
Gus Graynor is the owner and editor of the Fairbanks Mercury newspaper. A man who prides himself on his independence, Gus is also passionate about Alaska. One day he gets a call from his neighbor, a widowed physician and subscriber to his weekly, who tells him the mixed spruce-
birch forest that lines the Chena River by her home and his has disappeared. While Gus sympathizes, trees being cut down are unfortunately no longer news.
Besides, Gus is a practical man who knows the stories he runs must now attract a broader range of readers if he is to keep the paper alive. But to appease the doctor, he assigns Gayle Kenneally, a single mother and a native Alaskan whom he hired to sell ads, to go along with him to check out the facts.
When Gus first decided to buy the Mercury after serving a term on the borough assembly, he had known nothing about the newspaper business. Yet the idea of a newspaper had made him feel as though he was “volunteering for a dangerous mission into no-man’s land, except for the sweetness of it.” Friends, including Tad Saliman, an entrepreneur who had made it big during the pipeline days, had invested. But that was 10 years ago Now, Gus worries about making the payroll.
As he and Gayle pursue what may or may not be a story, he begins to realize how little he knows about native Alaskans and their lives. The appearance of a girl’s body in a river sadly begins to make sense. Then Gus discovers that Saliman, now a developer, is the owner of the property that once held the trees. And the unlikely pair go into action.
Driven by characters containing enough flaws to make the reader care about them, this intelligent novel deftly reveals the power of individual commitment against money and personal connections powerful enough to destroy.
“Hear Him Roar,” by Andrew Wingfield (Utah State University Press, 225 pages, $19.95)
Charlie Sayers is a biologist in his early 60s who has just retired after years of working at a job he loved for the regional Department of Wildlife in Sacramento, Calif. Not a golfer and desperate for something to do, he has volunteered for Hooked on Fishing, a new program for city kids. But his heart still belongs to the Department of Wildlife.
When he learns a cougar attacked a female runner along a Sacramento jogging trail by the river, he is not surprised. He already knows that if the woman dies, the animal will be captured and killed. Then the Friends of the Mountain Lion will go into action. And when the jogger does die, his predictions prove to be right.
The inevitability of the scenario depresses him. Yet what other course did a mountain lion have when people have turned what once were open fields into an “oasis of tastefulness” in upscale developments? He rescues the lion’s two cubs.
Still depressed, he becomes plagued with memories of his son’s death and his failed marriage. Desperate to pull his life together, he accepts the invitation he received from the attractive young director of the local zoo after he brought her the two cubs. He becomes a full-time volunteer. But at home his life with the woman he loves is falling apart. Then a little boy disappears by the river. A mountain lion may be responsible. When activists on both sides go into action, Charlie knows what he must do.
Well-plotted, “Hear Him Roar” is a quiet story of one man’s stubborn search for a way to live up to his beliefs.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional fiction releases.
