The Devil You Know

This was a very fast read. Thoughtful, well written, paints an ethereal landscape using words the way JMWTurner uses oil. Thoroughly enjoyable. Read it over a weekend. As it read it, it occurred to me the author had fun writing this book-however morose and heartbreaking some of the content.

i read this book at work and had to stop reading it at times because i wasn't paying attention to the phones, or wouldn't see people coming in. once you pick it up, you won't want to put it down.

This was a really good book, the plots and ideas really keep you moving along, though near the end you feel like it should be over (still worth it to finish until the end). Only real problem I had with it is that it was a little difficult to read, what I mean is the way it was written was hard to follow along with at times.

I normally do not read best-sellers or "page-turners," but when I saw that the author was a teacher at the Iowa Workshop and that it was set in the Boundary Waters wilderness in the seventies (I went on two life changing trips in this area as a teen from Chicago in the seventies) I was excited about reading this book. I enjoyed the book a great deal and stayed up later than normal each night reading it. I thought it was curious that the author is a writing teacher yet a lot of the story telling was, well, less succinct than a writing teacher would let a writing student get away with. Also, the writer, when he really gets in his element, has a peculiar way of using a lot of commas, which for me is distracting and decelerating - but I think this is his personal style and ultimately it works. Whenever I read a book like this my impression is that the writer isn't writing a book but is writing something they hope will be made into a movie. I don't know if this one will be filmed - I hope it will.