Telling Frontier & modern-era stories “West of Here.”
West of Here. By Jonathan Evison. Chapel Hill, NC : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011. 486 p.
Recommendation submitted by:
Sean Lanksbury, NW and Special Collections Librarian, Washington State Library.
Jonathan Evison was awarded the 2009 Washington State Book Award (formerly the Governor’s Writers Awards) for his debut novel, All About Lulu. His second novel, West of Here, is an ambitious historical fiction that threads two eras of Pacific Northwest development together.
Set in the fictitious, but utterly recognizable Port Bonita, the filmic narrative cuts back and forth between the struggles of newly arrived settlers and the native Klallam in late 1880’s Olympic peninsula and how their descendants face the present-day outcomes of their ancestors’ fears and ambitions. Against a backdrop of a vast and indifferent wilderness, characters’ desires meet and crash against harsh truths as the many characters struggle to find themselves and their place within Port Bonita as the town first forms from a frontier settlement and more than a century later as it struggles to remain a community.
Fans of historical fiction will appreciatively debate the nod given to early journals of Olympic Peninsula exploration, particularly those of James Christie and the Press Expedition. Evison’s descriptive and modestly crafted prose will edge interested readers towards the novel’s conclusion.
ISBN-13: 978-1565129528
Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 EVISON 2011
Available in eBook, Braille and digital talking book editions.
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