Kent MeyersRecensioni

I liked this book. There were some beautiful lyrical passages. There were thought provoking passages. There were interesting characters that I cared about. Somehow though the book didn't jell quite as much as perhaps it should have. Carson was such a smart, strong man starting from when he was a boy as the book opened that I felt that I expected more from him. That somehow even though he triumphed in some ways, in others he was blowing in the wind a bit. The book had such a strong beginning that I expected more at the end. More of an arcing inevitable bracketing in the end.

The characterizations were where the book really shone. Besides Carson, Earl Walks Alone was a stand out character. His was a clear shinning note, sort of an anti stereotype of an Indian. Norm, his uncle, and his mother were clearly drawn. Ted and Willi were also interesting characters. I also felt like the setting of western South Dakota was almost a character in itself.

Well it was absorbing and interesting for the most part. But I lacked that feeling of closing the book satisfied that all was wrapped up, every inevitable action had happened and everyone was right where they should be as I turned the last page.

4 stories, 2 indians on different paths, one cowboy, and one German exchange student. They all converge because of the welfare of 3 horses. Throughout the story of the horses you get glimpses of the lives of the 4 characters both during and before the adventures in this book. It's about people, animals, and the land that they all call home.

I loved this book, the way it begins with an event, and an horrific one at that, and then explores the way that affects the locals of the area. Some have complained that it is too disjointed, with each chapter told from a different personality's point of view, but I didn't feel that way. I feel it encapsulated the atmosphere of the town, and provided tacit commentary, and rightly examines the way the things that happen around us can affect aspects of a person's life.

A harrowing tale of January 12, 1888 in the newly settled US plains. The History Channel website puts it like this:

On this day in 1888, the so-called "Schoolchildren's Blizzard" kills 235 people, many of whom were children on their way home from school, across the Northwest Plains region of the United States. The storm came with no warning, and some accounts say that the temperature fell nearly 100 degrees in just 24 hours.
It was a Thursday afternoon and there had been unseasonably warm weather the previous day from Montana east to the Dakotas and south to Texas. Suddenly, within a matter of hours, Arctic air from Canada rapidly pushed south. Temperatures plunged to 40 below zero in much of North Dakota. Along with the cool air, the storm brought high winds and heavy snows. The combination created blinding conditions.

THAT I can understand! However, Laskin takes this story and, instead of making it real to the average reader, bogs down the text with an abundance of technical terms, protracted weather explanations and hard-to-follow story lines. I will take one at a time.

While I appreciate Laskin's desire to educate me on weather phenomena, his use of meteorological terminology did little to boost my understanding of why this blizzard occurred. Instead, reading the reasons, lows, highs, barometric pressures, and such was like swimming in quicksand. I quickly abandoned careful reading and resorted to skimming - something I am sure no author desires from his audience.

The weather causes and effects explained in a careful scientific manner went on and on, bogging me down regularly. That, added to the character-heavy ramblings, and I was thoroughly confused chapter after chapter. There was almost a feeling of "oh, by the way, since I mentioned him, let me tell you his life story." I would have rather been introduced to a few key families and followed them throughout the story.

Because of the subject matter, and to honor the over 200 people that perished, I really wanted to like this book. However, I am sorry to say that I cannot recommend this one.

This book is sort of billed as a modern day western, but it's not. It the story of a boy who has a way with horses and a love of the ranch land he lives on. These are not traits that his father shares, nor many others he is in contact with. Carson, the main character buys his first horse from the richest landowner named Magnus, a man who is never happy unless he is getting the better of someone. He doesn't get the better of Carson with the sale of the horse, nor during any of their future interactions, and this angers Magnus, to the point of seeking cruel revenge. Carson is helped by an usual cast of characters, including Willi, a foreign exchange student. It is the side side of Willi, that prevented me from loving the book as I saw it as an unneeded distraction. Otherwise this book, is outstanding. The writing is beautiful, and places the reader among the characters and setting of the book perfectly.½

Way too dark...

This book is written in chapters, like most books, however each chapter is told from the point of view of one person in the town. Each chapter-sub-story lets us look into the lives of these people and as we read along we begin to see how the stories intertwine into the history of a place. You often hear about how in small towns everyone knows everyone else, well this is why that is.

Twisted Tree is a beautifully written book about the bonds between people and the places they come from. It starts out with a murder and in some ways there is some mystery behind who would have done the murder itself, but the story goes well beyond that. It is just as possible that by the end of the book you have forgotten to wonder who killed the people on the highway, because you have become so caught up in the lives of the others who knew them that you simply became a part of the town.

The Work of Wolves is a beautifully written modern day western, complete with a cowboy hero and his new-found pals.

The book opens as 14-year-old Carson Fielding, already a smart and talented horseman, negotiates the purchase of a horse from a local wealthy and powerful rancher, Magnus Yarborough. Things go Carson’s way, but already we know Magnus doesn’t like anyone getting the better of him. Magnus, as it turns out, is a cruel, vindictive, and jealous man.

Fast forward 12 years and we meet two teens, Earl Walks Alone, a Lakota determined to get off the reservation and escape the prejudices of the locals, and Willi Schubert, a German exchange student entranced with the west and dealing with his own family’s secrets. Carson, now 26, is a horse trainer and when Magnus needs three horse trained as well as his young wife taught to ride, Carson agrees, if only to help with his father’s finances. A late night discovery soon brings the three young men together.

Initially, I thought Myers may have thrown a bit too much into the background of his characters. Sometimes the thoughts and background of Earl and Willi took me away from the main action, but the writing is eloquent and the characters well drawn and I soon felt engaged with their stories as well. Conflicts abound, some inevitable, and relationships, both good and bad, are at the heart of the story. The beauty and desolation of South Dakota makes for a well-described secondary character.

Fans of modern western/coming of age stories will love this book. A warning for the sensitive, though – this western is not necessarily kind to its livestock.½

This is a very special book. I don't remember being as affected by a book in a long time. This collection of reflective essays of the author’s experience growing up on a Minnesota farm in the 1960s and 1970s is framed by the end of the farm following the loss of the author's father. There's nothing flashy; no compelling plot to keep the pages turning, yet I read the book with a sort of awe and reverence, even a prickle on my skin. Kent Meyers writes as beautifully and movingly of the small detail: the tall grasses and miniature ecosystems of the dredge ditch, or the lowly cocklebur, against which soybean farmers labor all summer; as the eternal: the stories and rhythms that compel humans who live their lives under the stars, environmental stewardship juxtaposed with harsh farming economics, both considered against the Catholic taxonomies of sin, the aura that surrounds a badger. I found myself tearing bits of paper and marking particularly moving or profound or beautiful paragraphs or pages to return to and share aloud with my husband, my friends, with anyone, really. For an even more eloquent, and deeply personal take on the power and brilliance of this book, please see the review under mine written by TimBazzett. This is definitely a favorite, favorite read of 2011.

Each chapter in this novel could almost be read as a stand-alone short story. The characters are peripherally inter-related, but each is dealing with their own sense of loss and despair. They are linked together by the town of Twisted Tree, South Dakota and by the death of one Twisted Tree inhabitant, Hayley Jo Zimmerman.

Hayley Jo was murdered by a serial killer who stalked anorexics online, befriending them under false identities. After he gained their trust and confidence, he would find them where they worked or lived, kidnap them, and then murder them. The reader learns of Hayley Jo’s demise in the first chapter which is told in the third person but from the killer’s perspective. As Meyers exposes the killer’s madness bit by bit through his disjointed thoughts, it creates a level of creepiness and anxiety that merely hints at the portending evil in store for Hayley Jo.

The following chapters highlight one or two characters in Twisted Tree with some characters appearing in multiple chapters showing how they are connected. Each character has been impacted by the death of Hayley Jo, regardless of how well they knew her. In addition, the death of Hayley Jo resonates within each characters own life experience. Meyers is a gifted writer with a knack for making an understated impact.

Dear Kent,
I need to thank you - for writing The Witness of Combines. I know it's been a dozen years or so since you published it, but I've only just now 'discovered' it. It's such a deeply personal work, filled with wisdom, humor and an obvious love of family.
The details provided about the everyday life on a family farm back in the sixties and seventies are so valuable today, since those decades were really nearly the end of family farms as we knew them. Your anecdotes about chickens and how they progress so rapidly from those adorable and animate little yellow puff balls to pullets and chickens who produce not just eggs, but all that mess in the coop, which has to be cleaned periodically, and the stink and ammonia-like fumes that go right to your lungs as you scrape off the roosts, gagging, coughing and quietly cursing. I remembered it all, reading your memories, right up to the killing, plucking, cleaning and eating, when, as you said, no matter how many of those nasty fowl made up a big family meal, it was never 'chickens' we ate, but simply 'chicken.' Personally, after having such an intimate acquaintance with those filthy fowl, I remained for years a bit squeamish about eating them, preferring Mom's biscuits and gravy to the actual meat itself. Now I like chicken, but I'm fifty years removed the chicken coop cleaning by now.
I found it especially meaningful how you managed to make pulling weeds into an uplifting experience, albeit years later, equating the cockleburs with the constellations and connecting it all to celestial bodies and studying the skies. Sounds unlikely, I know, but it works wonderfully. Almost made me want to learn more about the stars, to go along with all those myths and legends I studied in college and beyond - and all those weeds I once hoed so resentfully in our acres of cucumbers, or, as my brothers and I called it all, the "pickle patch."
And the sibling tensions expressed in "Stuck" are pitch perfect, as are the small adventures and joys of same described in "Night Grove" and "How Joel and I Almost Became Mountain Men." All of which made me chuckle in rueful recognition.
I think, however, what will remain with me the longest from this collection is the way you remember your parents, particularly your father, who you knew for such a cruelly short time. He lives on in the values he instilled in you, and he gave you the strength to keep things going on the farm for a short time and then to make a good life for yourself. And if you are anything like me, I'll bet you still 'talk' with your dad nearly every day. Fathers. Even when they seem distant or remote, they matter - are so important. This book is such a wonderful tribute to your dad, and also to your mother.
Although I say I can relate to much of what you've written in The Witness of Combines, my own childhood farming experiences were on a much smaller scale, helping out on my grandfather's 'hobby farm' located adjacent to our home, part of which was even inside the city limits of our small town. But I still remember those damn chickens, and all those sweltering days spent planting, hoeing, weeding and then repeatedly picking all those damn pickles. And I also remember the satisfaction I felt after long days of haying with my brothers and Grandpa, and how we'd all pile into the car after dark and head out to a nearby lake to swim and wash away the sweat, dirt and chaff. It's all of a piece now, those memories - the misery and the joys. But like you, the advice and counsel and example of my dad and grandfather have stuck with me. Work first; then you can play.
God, I loved this book! I savored it. I found myself, marking my place with a finger, closing it and stroking the glossy cover with my thumb and fingers, trying perhaps to 'feel' more physically the things I was reading - and remembering. I didn't want it to end.
But all good books do end. I hope I will find time to return to this one on occasion. In the meantime I will shelve it with some other similar books which I treasure. Here's a short list of a few of them -

Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm, by Ronald Jager
Pulling Down the Barn, by Anne-Marie Oomen
From the Land and Back, by Curtis Stadtfeld
The Last Farmer, by Howard Kohn.

These are all farm memoirs from Michigan, and to these I'll boldly add my own, Reed City Boy, although I fear it doesn't really compare. Then there are these other country classics -

We Have All Gone Away, by Curtis Harnack (Iowa)
The Portable Prairie, by M.J. Andersen (South Dakota)
The Horizontal World, by Debra Marquart (North Dakota)
How It Looks Going Back, by Doris Knowles Pulis (Montana)

All of these books are memoirs. I also have a couple of fictional favorites in Mildred Walker's Winter Wheat and Don Kurtz's South of the Big Four.

Of course there are many more, Kent, but I just wanted you to know The Witness of Combines will be in good company here on my shelves. Once again, thank you for writing it. Your father would be so proud. No, not 'would be' - he is.
All the best,
Tim Bazzett

Southwest South Dakota may be a long way from Ohio, but as far as I can tell TWISTED TREE is just above WINESBURG. I read the latter book when I was in grad school back in 1969. I remember being mildy interested in this classic collection of interrelated stories of a small town in Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, and probably even had to write a paper about it. While I may not have been wildly enthusiastic about the book, it still stands as a kind of standard for that particular kind of book - small town life as depicted by interconnected detailed word portraits of certain of its citizens. There have certainly been countless variations on this theme in the several decades since Winesburg, Ohio was published. One of the most recent successes was Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, OLIVE KITTERIDGE, a book that caught me up. And now I've found TWISTED TREE, Kent Meyers' mesmerizing literary look at a small town in South Dakota, the same town that appeared in his earlier work, The Work of Wolves.

The unifying element here is the brutal rape and murder of Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a young woman from TWISTED TREE. The murderer is a serial killer who victimizes anorexics he finds and 'meets' online. My telling you this is not a spoiler. The murderer is introduced in the first chapter and is perhaps one of the creepiest characters whose head you'll ever get inside of. Reading that first section brought to mind The Silence of the Lambs. I also thought of Frederick Busch's disturbing beautiful novel, GIRLS. And yet Hayley Jo and her murderer are not really central characters. Meyers uses this luridly violent crime only as a catalyst to introduce and develop dozens of other characters you will not soon forget, the victim's family, friends and fellow townspeople. Gradually the secret lives of all these people are revealed, in ways that will keep you turning pages as fast as you can read. Marriages unravel, religion and faith fail, lives fall apart.

There is one particular set of characters, Brock and Angela Morrison, which gave me particular pause. Angela is a city girl who has a difficult time adjusting to the plain and lonely life of a rancher's wife. But Brock is an extremely patient and kind man. I thought of Carson and Rebecca, characters from Meyers' earlier novel, The Work of Wolves, speculating that yes, this is how it might have been for them had that plot line been carried through. Here Angela drifts into an affair with the Catholic priest in town. That same priest, Father Caleb, figures in his own chapter later in the book - a surreal encounter at the scene of a rainswept roadside auto accident. The faith he thought he had lost forever, flickers faintly back to life, when he has a kind of vision, which may or may not have to do with the Sioux legend of the White Buffalo Woman. And if this sounds a little too 'Twilight Zone/Outer Limits' far out, well it didn't seem that way while reading it. It's that well done. It WORKS, and is one of those goose-bumps, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up moments.

TWISTED TREE is a complex, beautifully written book. Meyers is obviously a man at the top of his game. Future graduate students in literature would do well to read this book in tandem with WINESBURG, OHIO. When they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they prefer Meyers.

The Work of Wolves is an ambitious undertaking in its attempts to connect the disenfranchisement of Native Americans and the Nazi failed experiments with a 'master race' and the extermination of the Jews, as well as drawing parralels to the Abraham and Isaac story from the Bible. And a lot of other stuff too, actually. And the most amazing thing is that Kent Meyers pretty much pulls it off. The book's various subplots and disparate characters all hang together and gradually merge into a single story by the book's conclusion. There are probably some who would protest that the 'love story' part of the plot is left unresolved, and that bothered me a bit too, but I finally decided that element was really a 'means to an end,' a catalyst that drove the rest of the story, which, in my own mind was all about the age old problem of poor communication between fathers and sons, their excruciatingly sad inability to express love for each other. There was the story of Abraham asked by God to sacrifice Isaac, his only son. And, with the contemporary stories presented here - of sons Carson, Earl, Willi and Ted - the rest of that story, Isaac's story, finally gets told, often in the most heartbreaking fashion.

This is not a "happily ever after" kind of story, but it is a damn good one, and you will be thinking about it long after you close the covers. Kent Meyers is a writer who knew what he wanted to say, and he said it well.

If you grew up on a farm or in a farming community, Meyers anecdotes about his early life will spark memories of your own. Daily chores, retrieving chicken from the orchard after dusk, playing basketball in the hay loft, and mom canning enough vegetables and fruits for a large family are just some of the chapters. Any fan of Kent Meyers books will also find his real life experiences reflected in his novels. Wonderfully reminiscent of a time gone by.½

Beautiful, especially the final chapter!

Ambitious attempt to bring the iconic power struggles of the American West, Native American mysticism and Nazi Germany together--and Meyers pulls it off far more successfully than I would have thought possible. There's some beautiful writing here, too, and a couple of truly memorable characters in the taciturn young cowboy Carson Fielding and the comparatively minor character Ted Kills Many. I'd have liked to have rated it higher, except couldn't get past feeling a lack of necessity in some of what passes for Necessary in the plot.

I read a blurb somewhere that said this book is about a horse trainer who gets involved with a rich land owner's wife (which, for all the description's worth, makes it sound like a knock-off of "All the Pretty Horses"--not to mention a zillion lesser books). Ever the fate of novels of ideas and character, I guess--literal plot description.

A warning I would've appreciated (course I never would have read the book if I'd heard it) is that every animal that puts in an appearance must, for some reason, die violently.

I really, really liked this book until the end. Having each chapter be from different characters' points of view was interesting. I especially enjoyed Luke Crandall's early chapter when he was a rebellious high school student, and he devised a taxonomy of bullshit. Some brilliant passages especially with the metaphor of the old river and with Soda Pop, but at the end , I wanted MORE of a resolution!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unbelievably powerful and lyrical story of a cowboy and his 2 friends, one a Lakota and one a German, who try to save the horses of a powerful and revengeful ranch owner.

Carson Fielding is a young man wise beyond his years especially when it comes to working with horses, and this grates against an evil core of jealousy and greed inside his neighbor rancher Magnus Yarborough. This coming-of-age novel touches on society's prejudices from many angles and the heart of people as they relate to each other and to the creatures of this world. Animal abuse is graphic.

My review goes here

2005 Alex Award