This story brought their experiences to light in a unique way. The Ft Peck area in 1933 Montana was Wild West beyond my imagination. The author brings it to life, weaving a family life, the dynamics of the area, the happenings of the 1930 and a mystery into a wonderful vivid novel.

I highly recommend Bucking the Sun to anyone interested in spending a few hours in such a story.

Andy


Will It Ever End ?   December 31, 2002
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Ivan Doig, as usual, writes great sentences and very good paragraphs. However, once he gets beyond 200 pages, the whole story drags. I liked his shorter books very much, and waited until I had several weeks of free time to tackle this longer work, knowing it would be slow going. It turned out to be even slower reading than I expected. Doig obviously learned a lot from Stegner about constructing long, complex sentences out of unfamiliar words ( or non-words on all too many occasions ) that have to be parsed carefully to suck out all the nuances of meaning, which works well for a short book of poetry but fails in a work of this length. After a while, the reader just wants the torture to end, but there is no way to hurry through Doig's convoluted poetry/prose. Doig's characters are at once totally unbelievable and exactly like my Scotch-Irish relatives, who are also unbelievable, or at least highly improbable in their actions and reasoning processes. In short, a book half as long would have been better.
Charlie A Allen


Sum of its Parts   December 21, 2000
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

A fine novel worth your time, but definitely not a mystery book. Sure the first 10 pages describe a murder scene, but there's nothing to solve. Actually, it doesn't get solved, it's lived with, and really that can be said for much of what the Duff family experiences.

All members of the family Duff are unique, as are their relationships. All are enjoyable with only the Scottish Uncle seeming a little too polished; his dialogue a little too precise. But that's a quibble because overall, Doig does very well with his characters. Throw in the dam as another major character and Montana itself, and you have a book worth your time; a great tableau of the 1930s Depression in America.

And if you know what the cover of the first Life Magazine looks like, you know Fort Peck. Doig weaves many real events into his fiction including a visit by FDR, a major dam mishap, and a visit from a Life photographer.


Epic Tale- Not A Mystery   October 27, 2000
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Despite the claims of some of the misleading reviews (including the Editorial review at the top of this page) this is not a murder mystery in any way. Yes, two of the characters do perish, as is revealed in the first chapter of the novel (which is not in chronological order with the rest), but this plays an absolutely minimal role in the story. While the question of who ultimately perishes does linger in the back of your mind while Doig relates the multi-faceted story of the Duff family, this is not a tale of a family coping with death. This is truly an epic story which combines interesting, developed, and, most of all, distinct characters with an extraodinarily well described setting- an enormous New Deal project and accompanying lively shantytown set amidst grand natural scenery. The result is a novel which anyone (though especially someone with an interest in or affinity for the American West) should thoroughly enjoy.