The Mountain and the Fathers has just garnered reviews in The Briar Cliff Review, The Great Falls Tribune, and Montana Quarterly! The reviews aren’t available online, but here are some quotes:
Page after page and sentence after sentence, this is one of the best-written and most readable books to come across this reader’s desk, worthy of keeping company with such excellent nonfiction such as A River Runs Through It, Blue Highways, and Tom Montag’s Curlew. -Phil Hey, The Briar Cliff Review
Words are [Wilkins’] escape from a dry, treeless, stony world and the entryway into other worlds. They’re the paving stones to self-knowledge. Later he finds respite in stories—true or not, some half-remembered. “It is when we recognize how stories fail us and how stories save us. It is when we have heard them both and tell, in the moment of out greatest need, the story that will save us.” This book is one of those stories. -Carol Ann Clark, The Great Falls Tribune
Wilkins does a wonderful job of telling the world of daily life—the hippie math teacher who’s effective in part because he throws boys against walls until they learn, strawberry ice cream and fishing, snakes and prairie fires and cheap vodka—but he hits a crescendo near the end, when he leaves the toughness behind and lets his mother remember reality, warm and joyous and not elegiac at all, from the first moments of life with her husband to the last, just a few years later: “Dancing, she was saying, every night that week. He came in every night that week and took me dancing…Two-dollar champagne, she said. We drank it out of soda bottles and drove all through the night…Anyway, I loved him. I love him.” -Jamie Harrison, Montana Quarterly
joewilkins.org 