The Flying Troutmans

WARNING: Click the audio button at your own risk. Audio content may cause drowsiness, nausea, and a deep aversion to book excerpts. My bad: instead of going to bed, I stayed up all night trying to sound “scholarly.” I better stick to talking to birds… or making people smile.

So the library phoned to say my book was in…

Miriam Toews’ The Flying Trout- mans was ready and waiting for me to pick it up.

Pick it up I did: dropping what I had been doing when the phone rang — the Tweeting and the Facebooking — I rushed out in the afternoon sun and literally galloped all the way to meet my new companion.

Because after reading a complicated kindness, I was totally hooked on Toews’ style and humour.

And judging from the opening paragraphs you’re about to listen to if you click on the audio button, her latest novel promises to be quite an adventure (yes… there’s also a road trip involved: cool!).

Here’s what’s written on the book jacket (in case my beautiful rendition of the first two paragraphs hasn’t quite hypnotized you into buying the book):

The impetuous Hattie has just been dumped by her Paris boyfriend; her sister, Min, is going through a particularly dark period; and Min’s two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively.

So when Hattie receives an SOS call from eleven-year-old Thebes, she grabs the first plane home. There she discovers that Min is on the way to a psychiatric ward, and Hattie assumes responsibility for the kids. She quickly realizes that she is way out of her league, and hatches a hare-brained plan to find the kids’ long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead to go on, she piles Logan and Thebes into their Ford Aerostar, and armed with some art supplies, a mondo pair of headphones and a cooler full of food, they hit the road and head south.

What ensues is a frantic expedition during which Hattie attempts to reconcile a tricky past with Min; Logan carves cryptic messages into the van’s dashboard; Thebes makes and distributes oversized novelty cheques to anybody who needs one; and the threesome discovers that while freedom has its costs, it also has its payoffs.

At once hilarious and heartrending, The Flying Troutmans tells the story of a fractured family on the verge of spinning off its axles and a road trip that just might keep them together.

That’s it for now…
Keep on rocking in the free world!
xoxo

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