Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was a short and text-free story of the author's trip into the wilderness of the Boundary Waters area on the US-Canada border in Minnesota on the US side. Maybe now isn't the best time to release this given the Coronavirus lockdowns, but better early than never, right?
This review was embargoed until August 15th, and this is a day early, but since there have been reviews published on that execrable Goodreads indie-killer review aggregating site - the one owned by Amazon - since May this year I don't feel guilty cheating by 24 hours, especially since I'm going to be busy tomorrow. The story is very simple and tells in pure pictures about the arrival, the canoeing, the camping, and so on.
I have to say up front that this kind of thing isn't my cup of tea, so while I thought it might be interesting, what I was really looking for here was the artwork and how appealing the story made this trip appear. I know that for the author, it had to have been special, and wonderful and entrancing, otherwise why write a book about it? The problem is that for me, it never came across as that. I never felt any desire to go there, not during reading, nor after I'd read this.
When I sat and thought about it afterwards, it occurred to me that there were two reasons for that. The first was that nature was missing! I mean, yeah, it was there, but only in part. It seemed like a painted backdrop to the author's story rather than the author's story, and there were undoubtedly things that were missing, such black flies, mosquitos, ticks, horseflies, deer flies...and bears. Oh my! The wildlife shown was the cute and cuddly kind, nothing else. You know full-well there are biting flies up there unless you go very early (before May, when the weather might be the problem) or late in the season (again, weather!), but according to this telling, there were none. I don't buy it!
Obviously there's more to a vacation than the problems - there are also the joys, but this seemed dishonestly all joy and no penalty. That would be nice - thinking you could lie there and contemplate your navel, or the sky, or the babbling brook or rustling trees, or whatever, without any irritations - meditating pleasantly on the natural world, but it's not really like that, especially not if you have to keep packing up your camp site to move to the next one, and setting up and starting fires and maintaining fires and putting out fires and on and on. I guess it depends upon what trips your trigger - or in this case triggers your trips, but for me the appeal was missing.
The second problem I had was the artwork itself. It really didn't do anything for the location. It was flat and bland and for the longest time I could not figure out what the water lilies were. At first I thought they were maybe logs - that some logging was going on and these were the logs floating down the river, but that seemed a bit off. It took me a couple of pages and then a backtrack to realize they were water lilies! The perspective seemed all wrong in that first picture. The rest of the art was equally uninspiring.
I wish the author all the best in his career, but based on my reaction to this as it stands, I can't commend it as a worthy read.
