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Summary
Summary
Caja que contiene un desplegable y un libro que narra un episodio de la serie de TV con imágenes en 3D, un póster 3D, dos pares de gafas 3D y unas figuritas de cartón con los personajes de la serie Generator REX que pueden ponerse de pie (con soporte para que se sostengan y el niño juegue con él a modo de escenario)
Summary
From the rugged mudflats of the Northwestern frontier to a rusting strip mall, West of Here is a conversation between two epochs. In his eagerly awaited second novel, Jonathan Evison tells the stories of the people who first inhabited the mythical town of Port Bonita in Washington State from 1887-1891. Moving ahead more than a century to 2005-06, he introduces those who live there now and must deal with the damage done by their predecessors. The characters are drawn with compassion and truth, the themes are grand and sweeping: regeneration, the trappings of history, the elusive nature of perception, who makes footprints and who follows them. Evison writes with heart and verve, capturing evocative details and unforgettable scenes.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Evison's capacious novel toggles between glorious past and constrained present, the idealism of the settlers of the American West and their hapless descendants. Port Bonita fails to live up to the imagined splendor of the Western pioneers, becoming, instead, the place where the American Dream goes to die-or, at the very least, to convalesce. Edoardo Ballerini is well-equipped to handle the blended tones of Evison's story, bouncing between hushed intimacy and a fierce growl. He steps delicately through the gruff talk of Port Bonita's inhabitants, pulling back into a poetic reverie for Evison's descriptions of the landscape and surroundings, reminding the listener that even in this world-weary city, something of America's magnificence remains. An Algonquin hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Evison, author of this audacious historical novel, manages a near-impossible feat: first, he creates an almost absurdly complex narrative structure, bridging more than 100 years of life in Washington State and encompassing multiple points of view, and then he grounds the sublime architechtonic whole in the vividly realized daily lives of characters who exist completely in their individual moments but whose actions reverberate back and forth across time. The action swirls around the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and jumps between the 1890s, when various explorers and entrepreneurs were attempting to roll up their sleeves and put this place on the map, and 2006, when the descendants of those rugged individualists are in the process of dismantling the dam that their ancestors built. Yes, the tension between taming nature and restoring it drives the narrative, but it never pigeonholes it; rather, the interconnectedness of the structure expands to encompass the lives of the entrepreneur who built the dam and his ancestor who finds that failure tastes like gunmetal on his tongue; the explorer who prays for a life beyond fear, a life that got bigger, really got bigger, as it recedes ; and the factory foreman who is alternately obsessed with tracking Bigfoot and despondent over his inability to get a girl ( No woman in the history of the world had ever looked into a guy's eyes and said, You had me at Bigfoot' ). And countless others, who both support the parallels between eras and exist robustly in their own fully formed selves. Any one of Evison's numerous major characters could have owned his or her own novel; that they coexist perfectly in this one, undiminished but without overwhelming one another, is testament to the book's greatness.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WE Americans love to uproot ourselves and head out for unfamiliar territories. Our reasons, if sometimes murky, are also manifold: a fear of what's brewing at home or the ache for an ideal that virgin land might help realize. We want riches. We thrill at jumping into the uncertain void. "West of Here," Jonathan Evison's broad-spectrum new novel, plays host, gleefully and mischievously, to all of the above. More than a dozen central characters willfully flip their lives upside down and inside out, eyes on the horizon. The book charts the trajectory, over 127 years, of Port Bonita, a fictional outpost on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle. In 1889, the explorer James Mather sets out from Port Bonita "to conquer the last frontier of the Washington Territory," that is, the peninsula's interior, "a chaos of snow-clad ranges colliding at odd angles, a bulwark of spiny ridges defending a hulking central range like the jaws of a trap." Meanwhile, Ethan Thornburgh arrives from Chicago, "all buttoned up in a brown suit with tails, freshly coiffed, smelling of camphor and spices, his cleft chin clean-shaven, a waxed mustache mantling his lip like two sea horses kissing." Thornburgh has followed an erstwhile lover who plans on carving a utopian society from the wilderness. But he is less concerned with socialist ideals than with seizing his destiny. This town doesn't just need a hydroelectric dam, it needs one engraved with Thornburgh's name. And then - whoosh! - we are shuttled to 2006, where the descendants of these stately visionaries emerge as a crowd of sad sacks, pussyfooting through their lives. Thornburgh's great-grandson manages a fish processing plant, with "nothing more to show than a dwindling trust fund and a head full of canned crab." One of his co-workers roams Mather's wilderness searching for a discovery of a different kind: Sasquatch. Port Bonita hasn't become a Seattle or a San Francisco; rather, it's just a cog in the homogenous machine that industrialists like Thornburgh helped create - between the beer halls and trailer parks are Red Lion Inns, Taco' Bells and fleets of U.P.S. trucks. "West of Here" can be riotously funny. A report to the Sasquatch Field Research Organization is wonderfully charming in its nerdy studiousness. An eggnogchugging parole officer woos his charges with spirited orations. And when Evison describes the overeager décor of a humble saloon as "a bear in lipstick," you can't help rolling your eyes back to the 2008 presidential campaign. What then is the problem? Like so many who have set off for wider worlds, "West of Here" seems to be undergoing an identity crisis - part modern comedy, part historical novel, part societal indictment, part environmental cri de coeur. It might be all these things, except that it isn't. Evison remains uncommitted, to such an extent that the novel becomes as muddy as Port Bonita's first roads. Rarely does Evison stick with a set of characters - and therefore a theme - for more than a handful of pages. Many of his creations, including a gilded-hearted prostitute and an assembly of sagacious Indians who listen to a "heartbeat from the center of the earth," feel lifted from the dustier rooms of central casting. Worst, the critique of contemporary society is distressingly reductive. Yes, we've all heard the denunciations of Wal-Mart. "We are born haunted," one character declares. "Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. . . . And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire." There's a certain truth to all that. Yet Evison chooses to assert it most vigorously through two Indian boys living a century apart who speak to each other while in a catatonic state. It's not clever or incisive, and when their relationship boils down to Kentucky Fried Chicken, it's downright irritating. The Olympic Peninsula's grandeur gradually gives way to beer halls and trailer parks. Mike Peed has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and other publications.
Kirkus Review
Well-plotted, literate novel of the 19th-century settling of a corner of the West and the still-resounding echoes of decisions made long ago.The Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, Wash., was little known even to Native American people until very recent times, thanks to its "chaos of snow-clad ranges colliding at odd angles, a bulwark of spiny ridges defending a hulking central range like the jaws of a trap." Those imposing mountains long defied exploration and exploitation, but in time, as sophomore novelist Evison (All About Lulu, 2008) explains, they drew a particular kind of person who just wouldn't go away, seeing in them the promise of endless wealth. So it is with James Mather, an "Arctic explorer, Indian fighter, and rugged individual" who arrives in the soggy outpost of Port Bonita with orders from the governor to bring the place under the aegis of civilization. Ethan Thornburgh, young and dissolute, has a somewhat different vision: He aims to turn the mountains into money, the better to make the place his own domain. The communitarians ("Weren't they socialists or something?"asks a latter-day resident of the place, none too well versed in history), squatters and Indians who live nearby have different visions still. Much of Evison's storywhich, naturally, involves a headstrong pioneer womanis conventional, though, borrowing a page from Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers(1980),it makes room for closely observed notes on American Indian life as seen through the lens of a couple of key players. What brings the story to life, though, is Evison's juxtaposition of a century past with a much different present, in which the derring-do of our forebears is seen as so much criminality, and the things that they builtparticularly damsas so many insults to the land that require undoing and atonement.Evison moves his narrative backward and forward through time, taking a leisurely approach to telling a story that is seldom dramatic, but that Westerners will recognize as their own.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Evison's debut novel, All About Lulu (2009), won a Washington State Book Award. The theme of this superb second novel is that people can try to reinvent themselves, but, whether or not they know it, they'd only be repeating history. The 19th-century characters in this beautifully complex tale set in a mythical Washington State town include a feminist conflicted by the demands of motherhood and her desire for a meaningful career, the proprietor of the local bawdy house, and the Klallam Indians. They are paralleled over a century later by other characters including an ex-con wanting to re-create himself in the wilderness, a parole officer seeking to save the ex-con from himself, and an environmentalist whose impending motherhood changes her attitude toward life. Actor Edoardo Ballerini's (www.-edoardoballerini.com) narration is masterly-he clearly defines each character, and his ethnic accents are distinctive but not exaggerated. An excellent choice for all libraries; expect book club demand. [See Major Audio Releases, LJ 1/11; the Algonquin hc also received a starred review, LJ 10/1/10.-Ed.]-Nann Blaine Hilyard, Zion-Benton P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
