School Library Journal Review
YA Unresolved relationships with his family and friends and a heritage of farming come into focus when Guy Pehrsson, a California computer entrepreneur, returns to Minnesota 12 years after he ran away at age 18. His childhood ``blood brother,'' Tom Little Wolf, a Chippewa Indian, is now a tribal lawyer intent on reclaiming farmlands mishandled in past treaties, lands which include the Pehrsson's homestead. This conflict tests but never breaks the bond between the two men. Guy puts his life in perspective and sees that he and the men in his family have often used land or machines to distance themselves from people. This apocalyptic first novel is rich in the colors and characters of contemporary rural Minnesota, and spiced with Indian lore and legend. Back country road shenanigans with cars and tractors and sheriffs and Indians add a touch of Dukes of Hazzard to the story. Characters who are able to laugh at themselves also add comic relief to a sensitive and moving novel of a man's emotional growth.Keddy Outlaw, Harris County Public Library, Houston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
No lack of energy--and even some patches of fine writing--in this leave-no-topic-unturned modern western of bad blood between the rednecks and the redskins in northern Minnesota, 1984. Farm-boy Guy Pehrsson, after losing a flax crop worth $15,000 (his grandfather won't let him harvest the cut grain on Sunday; on Monday come the rains), heads for California and makes a far bigger pot of gold in, you guessed it, Silicon Valley. Nine years later, a letter from Gramps arrives: trouble, come home. After a glass of chablis (while he thinks it over), Guy hops in his gray Mercedes and drives nonstop back to the farm in Minnesota, where he finds that his stroke-ridden grandfather is still reading the Bible; his father has become a bitter and violent drunk; and his mother (she was always the sensitive one, a lot like Guy) has moved in with an Indian on the reservation, namely the good Tom Littlewolf, Guy's childhood buddy and most faithful of friends. It turns out that Tom Littlewolf has become a lawyer and is now the chief force behind legal moves to reclaim White Earth Reservation land that over the past 80 years--mainly through deceit--has been taken over by the white man and turned into farms, reducing the Indians to lives of poverty, thieving, and disease. Guy finds himself in the midst of the struggle between Indians and briner-developers as it grows very nearly into a small war--with sabotage, shootings, explosions, and finally, half by accident, the rifle death of Tom Littlewolf. Much that is deeply routine (a screen-ready Senator; an agri-business investor; the gorgeous Cassandra Silver, press aide to the Senator and can't-help-herself lover of the increasingly James Bond-like Guy; the murderously deranged sheriff who didn't survive Vietnam quite with a full deck, etc.) is intertwined here with skillful evocations of farm life land, the plight of the Indians, and growing up in the country. Popular entertainment that pushes all the themes-of-today buttons and rolls right along while doing it. Said by its publisher to be slated for a TV miniseries. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this sprawling first novel of whites versus Native Americans in modern-day Minnesota, Guy Pehrsson returns from California's Silicon Valley to ``save'' the family farm. He finds his French-Canadian mother, Madeline, living with his boyhood chum and high school basketball teammate, Chippewa activist Tom LittleWolf. Guy's modernization-crazed Norwegian father, Martin, has mortgaged the family farm to the hilt, while his thrifty, wheelchair-bound grandfather, Helmer, borders on death. Disputed land titles quickly lead to nighttime guerrilla warfare between threatened white farmers and downtrodden reservation Indians with Guy, the semi-outsider, caught in the middle. A strong and fine sense of the Upper Midwest as a distinct geographical region permeates this melodramatic epic that is scheduled to be a TV mini-series. Character development is adequate to very good. Highly recommended for public libraries. James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.