Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg
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Book Reviews of Where Rivers Change Direction
Book Review: Horses' Hearts
Summary: 5 Stars
Mark Spragg writes beautifully, even poetically, of teenage life in a Wyoming family struggling to make ends meet by catering to "dudes" come West for the seasonal fishing and hunting. His collection of stories is varied, but all are tied to the splendor of unshod love for the land and for the horses he rides through a journey that will steal your heart.Book Review: For lovers of cowboy stories everywhere
Summary: 5 Stars
I was recommended this book by a friend and it was stunning. Great prose and a natural ability to tell a story. Mark Spragg has written a fine book that I could easily read again. To think the West is still lived this way so recently was an eye-opener. Well doneBook Review: Superb!
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Spragg's Fruit Of Stone and was disappointed with the silly plot. The writing, however, convinced me to try Where Rivers Change Direction. It is a magnificent book in all respects. Buy this book!Book Review: beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
A memoir that reads a wonderfully as fiction. Beautiful descriptions of horses and Wyoming and growing up. A real treat.Book Review: The Child's Truth
Summary: 4 Stars
What makes this book extraordinary is the author's ability to reach back into his child self, to recreate for the reader what it was like to be a young boy growing up in the foothills of the Wyoming wilderness, intimately connected to his natural surroundings and the creatures that inhabit it. Horses, we discover, are much more than a means of making a living. They are part of this boy's blood, welded to his bone structure, and tuned to his thoughts. And it is through this fusion of boy and horse that we get our first glimpse of what it's like to live on the edge of wilderness, subject to the whims of high altitude weather, sharing the landscape with grizzlies, elk, coyotes and coons, and learning from an early age to deal with danger and pain.
As the book unfolds in a series of episodes, each a self-contained story connected by the boy's evolving perspective, we learn about how this harsh country shapes and defines its inhabitants. We learn about knives and guns, gentling horses and hunting bears, drunken cooks and the reality of death. This is a world that leaves little room for daydreams, but fills the heart and mind nevertheless with the vibrancy of life.
Rarely has a book touched me with such immediacy and precision. Anyone who has been out in the wilds as a child will immediately recognize and respond to the young boy's awareness of his place in the world, his connectedness to all things. If the book lacks anything, it is completion and resolution. The stories found later in the book are full of the author's adult dilemmas stemming from a childhood lived so far outside the norm. He struggles with cities and relationships, his need for isolation and the demands of family. Finally, he must come to terms with his mother's lingering death, which ends the book on a sad and frustrating note. This is an absolutely exquisite book, containing some of the finest writing I've ever read, but one that ultimately feels incomplete.