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Summary
Summary
The Wind Is Not a River is Brian Payton's gripping tale of survival and an epic love story in which a husband and wife--separated by the only battle of World War II to take place on American soil--fight to reunite in Alaska's starkly beautiful Aleutian Islands.
Following the death of his younger brother in Europe, journalist John Easley is determined to find meaning in his loss. Leaving behind his beloved wife, Helen, he heads north to investigate the Japanese invasion of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a story censored by the U.S. government.
While John is accompanying a crew on a bombing run, his plane is shot down over the island of Attu. He survives only to find himself exposed to a harsh and unforgiving wilderness, known as "the birthplace of winds." There, John must battle the elements, starvation, and his own remorse while evading discovery by the Japanese.
Alone at home, Helen struggles with the burden of her husband's disappearance. Caught in extraordinary circumstances, in this new world of the missing, she is forced to reimagine who she is--and what she is capable of doing. Somehow, she must find John and bring him home, a quest that takes her into the farthest reaches of the war, beyond the safety of everything she knows.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This top-notch WWII historical novel from Vancouver-based writer Payton (Hail Mary Corner) involves the little-remembered Japanese invasion and partial occupation of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. War correspondent John Easley is shot down in a seaplane along with six crewmembers in April 1943, just off the barren island of Attu. He and the only other survivor, young Texan aviator Karl Bitburg, hunker down in a beachside cave while hiding from the Japanese. Meanwhile, John's wife, Helen, is living in Seattle while helping her father, Joe, recuperate from a stroke. She resolves to search for her missing husband, from whom she's been separated ever since she delivered an ultimatum to him to choose between her and his work. John had chosen to leave Helen and continue what he regarded as his patriotic duty as a war reporter, spurred on by the memory of his kid brother Warren's fatal crash into the English Channel while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Helen joins a USO troupe assigned to Alaska but finds the strict censorship of military information a hindrance to her desperate quest. Payton has delivered a richly detailed, vividly resonant chronicle of war's effect on ordinary people's lives. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Associates. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An unusual novel in that Payton takes us to a theater of war not normally visited--the Japanese-occupied Aleutian Islands in 1943. John Easley is deeply involved in the war but ironically not as a soldier--he's a journalist. On a quest for the truth about what's going on in this remote Alaskan territory, he is shot down and forced into survival mode on the island of Attu. The only other survivor of the crash is Airman 1st Class Karl Bitburg, a Texan running away from an impossible home life. For a while, the two survive on mussels and live in a cave, hidden from the 2,000 Japanese in their immediate area. Meanwhile, John's wife, Helen, is consumed with worry about her missing husband and decides to take desperate measures to learn of his fate. An amateur dancer and performer, she gets a job with the United Services Organization (thanks in part to a sympathetic band leader) and wangles a trip to entertain the troops in Alaska. She's able to find out small bits of information--for example, that John passed himself off as a Canadian soldier using the uniform of his younger brother, Warren, recently deceased in action around the English Channel. Further complications on the homefront involve Helen's father, Joe Connelly, whose recent stroke has left him somewhat incapacitated. Torn between caring for her father and looking for her husband, Helen is eased somewhat by Joe's insistence that she follow her heart and seek out John. Eventually, husband and wife reunite, but Payton keeps this reunion poignantly brief. Through a narrative strategy that alternates chapters between John's plight and Helen's search, Payton effectively gives the reader two visions--and two versions--of a neglected aspect of World War II.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Part adventure tale, part love story, this beautifully written novel offers a moving portrait of a couple whose lives are forever changed by the only battle of WWII to take place on American soil. Following the death of his brother in the war in Europe, grieving journalist John Easley feels an obligation to report on the war and talks himself onto a plane doing a bombing run over the Aleutian Islands. When the plane is shot down on Attu, he finds himself in a fight for his life as he battles hunger and the cold while hiding out from Japanese soldiers, who have shipped the natives off to internment camps and taken over the island. Meanwhile, back in Seattle, John's wife, Helen, lies about her lack of experience and joins a USO troupe set to entertain American soldiers in the Aleutians, determining that she will be more likely to locate John and bring him home if she is closer to the battle action. Payton, in the loveliest of prose, illuminates a little-known aspect of WWII while portraying a devoted couple who bravely face down the isolation, pain, and sacrifice of wartime.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THEY CALLED IT the "Aleutian stare." During World War II, American soldiers stationed in the remote, windswept archipelago stretching for 1,100 miles west of the Alaskan mainland fought a secret war against Japanese invaders. Driven mad by the cold, the isolation and the "dim, colorless light," some were taken away in straitjackets, gazing into the distance, "unfocused, unspeaking." The rest of the country didn't even know they were there. When Japanese forces seized the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska in 1942, American censors immediately ordered a news blackout to hide the invasion from a jittery public. Press and civilians were evacuated; even postcards with images of the landscape were confiscated, lest they fall into the wrong hands. Would the fighting spread to the lower 48 states? What would it take to turn back the enemy? In his gripping, meditative second novel, Brian Payton explores this nearly forgotten chapter of American history. John Easley, the ironically named hero of "The Wind Is Not a River," is a National Geographic reporter who defies the press embargo and sneaks into the Aleutians, intent on bearing witness to the heroism of American flyboys charged with bombarding the Japanese forces back into the sea. Easley manages to be included on a bombing run, only to be shot down by antiaircraft fire. Stranded on Attu with the only other survivor of the crash, a young airman from Texas, he faces frostbite and starvation, not to mention the threat of capture by Japanese patrols. These chapters are a survival manual of sorts, teaching us how to tell if mussels have been poisoned by the red tide, even how to extract a rotten tooth. The borders between ingenuity and insanity, honor and murder, all blur as Easley comes face to face with the darkest parts of human nature in a place where "thin fog softens every edge and line." Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to find her missing husband, Easley's young wife, Helen, joins a U.S.O. troupe that's traveling to Alaska to entertain the servicemen. It's easy to picture Helen's chapters as scenes from a brassy 1940s movie - the wolf-whistling G.I.'s, the showgirls with their bleached hair and plucked eyebrows, "the persistent A-flat of the engines" of the airplanes. In their base camp, "everything is the color of hay, smoke and khaki green." AS THE STORY opens out from Easley's desperate struggle for survival, Payton's larger theme emerges: People do what they have to do to survive, but what do they survive for? An act of kindness may be rewarded with death; inside every victory lies defeat. Sometimes circumstances force us to reimagine who we are and what we're capable of doing. Perhaps it's too much to ask for a happy ending; perhaps it's enough to be thankful for moments of grace and to remember always to leave room for hope. Fierce winds whip through the northern Pacific and the Bering Sea, bringing some of the world's most terrible storms to the volcanic islands that make up the Aleutian archipelago. Their winds are mercurial: "One moment it's a hurricane, the next a breeze." "But rivers!" Payton writes. "Rivers flow throughout the seasons - under bright summer sun, plates of winter ice - morning, noon and night. Wind rises up and fades away, but a river flows endlessly. And our suffering? This too shall pass." As they say in the Aleutians, "The wind is not a river." SARAH FERGUSON is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Elle, Vogue, The Guardian and New York magazine.
Library Journal Review
Still grieving the loss of his brother who went down with his plane over the English Channel, journalist John Easley, determined to make sense of the war, dons his brother's uniform and heads to the territory of Alaska where he hopes to document the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands. While John is accompanying a crew on a bombing run, his plane is downed over the island of Attu. He and one other survivor of the crash endure a desperate struggle to survive the cold and hunger while evading patrolling Japanese soldiers. Meanwhile John's wife, Helen, leaves her ailing father in Seattle and joins a USO show, hoping to make her way to Alaska to search for her husband. This moving and powerfully written novel explores themes of war, life and death, morality, and love in a unique World War II battleground that very few people outside Alaska know about or remember. -VERDICT Payton, known for his nonfiction works Shadow of the Bear and The Ice Passage, has written a suspenseful, beautifully researched title that readers will want to devour in one sitting. As a nearly lifelong inhabitant of Alaska and having spent three years on Adak in the Aleutians, this reviewer was particularly gratified by the accuracy of the author's portrayal of the land and people of the "birthplace of the winds." Bravo! [See Prepub Alert, 7/22/13.]-Jane Henriksen Baird, -Anchorage P.L., AK (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.