I read my first Brian Doyle in late 2014 or early 2015. Since then, I’ve taken in nearly everything he’s written. When we lost him in 2017, I felt that as a blow, and I guess I’m taking my time with his last few titles. The audiobook I’m listening to right now reminds me of him (more on that later, obv), and I’m still feeling the loss of this voice. And with all of his work that I’ve loved, Martin Marten still might rank at the very top. Please enjoy my original review below, and if you’re still hungry, check out my audio re-“read” here. May there be more of this sort of thing in the world.
A lyrical ode to all the inhabitants of the world, fun-loving and deathly serious as nature.
Fourteen-year-old Dave is one of the protagonists of Brian Doyle’s Martin Marten. He lives with his delightful, precocious six-year-old sister Maria and his wise, funny parents in a cabin on an Oregon mountain. Dave prefers to call the mountain Wy’east, which is the name given it by the people who lived there for thousands of years, rather than Hood, “which is what some guy from another country called it.”
Also in his adolescence on Wy’east in the same season that Dave enters high school and tries out for the cross-country team is Martin, who likewise is exploring his world, venturing farther from home and contemplating separation from his mother, and who will discover the females of his species around the same time that Dave does. A marten is a small, brownish mustelid with a diverse diet and a large territory, and Martin is as individual an example of his species as Dave is of his.
Doyle (Mink River) follows the coming-of-age of these two young males, and to varying degrees examines the lives and struggles of other inhabitants of Wy’east. These include the woman who runs the general store, Dave’s family and his best friend Moon, a schoolteacher and the dog who adopts him, a massive elk, an elderly bear and a retired horse, and each of their stories is deep and rich with humor and wisdom. The result is a lushly textured, loving, sensitive and whimsical symposium of trees, insects, birds and beasts.
This review originally ran in the April 14, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!
Rating: 10 tomatoes.
Still.
Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: misc fiction, nature, reruns, sense of place |
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