Thomas MaltmanRezensionen

Dark novel filled with ugliness, grotesquery, psychopathology, and grief, culminating with, among other things, murder-by-underground hog confinement manure pit, all topped off with inconsistencies in the manuscript.

'Little Wolves' is a bleak, dark, book, permeated with a sense of inevitable doom. It's filled with violence, abuse, death, deception, torture and oppression. The writing style felt a little self-consciously literary at times and seemed to be reaching for a deeper meaning beneath the story which I wasn't convinced by. The narrative is deeply, sometimes disturbingly, realistic but is laced with references to Norse myths, the nature of monsters and the heroes who battle them, the inescapability of fate and a belief in the reality-shaping power of storytelling.

Set in a small, failing town on the Minnesota prairies in 1987, it starts with a troubled teenager shooting the local sheriff with a sawn-off shotgun and follows the impact the killing has on the boy's father and the boy's teacher. The teacher is the preacher's wife, newly arrived, newly married, newly pregnant, haunted by old myths learned from her father about her absent-since-her-birth mother and hungry to discover her origins and root herself. The father of the boy is a struggling local farmer, widower and social outcast with a long-standing enmity with the sheriff. Both the main characters are outsiders with complicated views of the world, and trauma in their past that has twisted their belief in their agency over their own lives.

This is not a conventional drama where the reader is focused on working out how the hero will overcome overwhelming odds and right all the wrongs. Here, the heroes seem cursed, doomed to come face to face with monsters who will do them harm. Hope is replaced by stubborn endurance. Righting wrongs is replaced by the possibility of survival.

The town and the people in it are, for the most part, deeply unpleasant and entirely believable. The violence and anger and oppression that sits just beneath the surface of the social life of this failing town owes nothing to the supernatural and everything to a culture hierarchical culture dominated by violent men and sustained by a consensual silence about how the town works and a collective investment in an alternative narrative in which everything is fine.

There were points in this book when I became completely absorbed in the writing and in the disclosed pasts of the two main characters but there were other points when I felt that it was over-written and over-structured. It reminded me of one of those neo-gothic Scottish Baronial style castles that the Victorians built, look at them one feature at a time and you can admire each turret, medieval arch and mullioned window but when you look at the building as a whole it lacks authenticity.

I got the sense that Thomas Maltman has a strong dislike of rural, Lutheran-dominated small towns and the gap between how life works and how it is described. This book seemed like a way of taking a fresh look at the things he dislikes.
½

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. It's a Gothic prairie murder mystery, laced with Norse mythology and Beowulf. Definitely not forgettable!

Wanted to love this book as I loved Night Birds, but I did not. Writing was not the same and story line was convoluted. Read for book club and the discussion was good because there were a lot of topics introduced but overall the book did not work for me.½

This is one of those books where I liked the writing, but didn't quite know what to make of the plot. It involved a lot of things that I don't really know what's up with -- the Midwest, farms, Lutherans ...

The basic plot has some of the elements of a thriller -- it opens with a crime committed by a high school student, and throughout the book you get a lot of Dark Secrets Revealed kind of stuff -- but one thing I liked about it is that the book's focus remains on the interior lives of the main characters for the most part. While it's not a supernatural story, a big theme is how different people respond to ideas about the unknown, whether it be in a religious way or more of a folklore approach.

While I'm usually a fan of the Small Town, Big Secrets type of book, this did seem a little over the top, but I don't know, there's probably a reason I live in NYC. My biggest hurdle with this book was not being able to muster a lot of empathy for the primary character, the pregnant wife of the town's new pastor. I never quite got what her deal is ... she's cool with being rude (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not) in random social interactions, but doesn't seem able to apply any actual assertiveness to situations where it would be, you know, productive. I got the vague feeling that some of her, I'll say outbursts although that's not exactly it, are supposed to be chalked up to her pregnancy, although the book never managed to convince me of that. It always seemed to be the very stereotypical "pregnant ladies, go figure!" attitude.

Overall, this was a book that didn't really click with me in any board sense, but I did find it to be an easy, quick, and engrossing read while it was happening.

I liked this book for the small town Minnesota aspects. Great use of language though kind of confusing through parts of it.

A breathtaking, beautifully written and exceedingly violent historical novel about the Sioux Uprising of 1862.

The story traces three generations of a German immigrant family that settles across the river from a band of Dakota Sioux in Minnesota. Told from the points of view of both the settlers and the Dakota, it explores the shifting relationships between neighbors driven apart by their cultures and war.

Maltman’s writing is so evocative that I was enthralled from the first chapter, describing a disgusting plague of crunchy locusts, to the final pages revealing family secrets kept for a generation. Not for the faint-hearted, both animals and people are brutalized.

I will say that I figured out the big family secret in the second chapter, but I'm willing to forgive that, because I enjoyed the journey so much.

Also, even though there were sympathetic Dakota characters, I felt that they were portrayed as much more savage and brutal than the white characters. I would have liked to see some more balance.

Loved this book! Great characters, twisty plot, will be great for the All Iowa Reads selection for 2014. Difficult to put down.½

Clara Warren comes to the town of Lone Mountain, MN as a pastor's wife with a secret agenda of learning more about her own past; Lone Mountain is where her mother - of whom her father would never speak except in coded myth - died, and Clara survived. While her husband gets to know his new congregation, Clara teaches English at the high school; there, she meets Seth, an outcast who is drawn to her teaching of Beowulf. But when Seth commits a terrible crime, both Clara and Seth's father Grizz feel there must be more to the story than what is apparent on the surface. Separately, they begin to uncover dark secrets about the town. The story alternates between Clara and Grizz, always in third person, and Clara's sections include some of her father's stories as well as some myths she writes down for herself.

Quotes:

Few people know you so well as those who hate you. (20)

From one [box] she hefted out her Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which she figured a suitable weapon for doing battle with ghosts trying to take up residence under the stairwell. She held the substantial bulk of the alphabet in her hands, a word for every reality. Madness was for when words failed. (28)

This is what she discovered two nights after the murder: In birth all things are kindred, the sounds we make universal to any species. We enter wailing of a lost world. (30)

Writing was her prayer. (60)

"God gave us an imagination. It may be one of the most beautiful functions of our brain. He left the space open for us to fill." (156)

The dead carve out a space inside us, taking up residence like a man stepping under a willow tree in the rain to sit beside the ghost of our former selves. In this manner each of us is haunted, and who would have it any other way? (216)

The story of what happened went on reverberating in the words and gestures of everything people in town said...all of them knowing there was no language large enough to take the awfulness away. (322)

Multi-generational story of a German family torn apart by the violence of the 1800's: slavery, Indian wars, and Mother nature that can be equally as brutal. Told in two time frames, the 1850's and the 1870's with each story tightly intertwined. Leaving Missouri after the father prints an anti-slavery article, the father and children and stepchildren head for the Minnesota frontier. The Dakota Indians are not unfriendly neighbors but fear, distrust, and misunderstandings plague everyday life until the Great Sioux War of 1962 tears everything apart.

The story centers on Hazel, a young girl, whose father has taught her of the "old ways" of healing and her effect on the family. Friendly with the Indians, Hazel is later captured and becomes the wife of a young Indian brave. After the Great War, Hazel becomes reunited with part of her extended family. The story is told from the viewpoint of Asa,a young man whose life is affected by Hazel's years later. rt4

The writing in this novel is beautiful although brutal in the description of daily life on the unplowed frontier. Nature is not merely a background but an active force throughout the story. The characters of children, young mothers, soldiers, old Dakota Indians, and farmers are so clearly drawn. Life was unbelievably hard and cruel, but the human spirit although at times broken and equally as cruel can maintain a spark of belief and hope in something better. A remarkable novel of the frontier.

Set on the Minnesota prairie, in 1980, this novel opens with an horrendous act and a father who needs and wants answers. The tone from the beginning is ominous and the story just pulled me in and kept me there. Small town, life, farms that are failing, a preacher's wife who has ties to the place but doesn't really understand how or why she has been drawn there. A father who told his daughter stories of wolves and mythology, Beowolf, wolves, coyotes, what do they all mean and where does the evil begin and end? Sensitive characters that are attuned to their environment, a reckoning, revenge, so many parts to this novel. The setting is stark, somewhat barren, the writing crisp as the reader seeks to understand what is happening in this town. Apparently this author has a previous book that I now very much want to read.

Little Wolves
by
Thomas Maltman

My " in a nutshell" summary...

A tragedy occurs in a small town and because of this lives are changed and a multitude of secrets are discovered.

My thoughts after reading this book...

This is one of those tremendous tragic novels that only truly gifted storytellers can master. It's a story of tragedy and sadness that mesmerized me as the reader. It's the kind of horror and nightmarish tragedy that can not even begin to enter our imaginations. This book is sad and graphic and filled with animals and stories. I am a person who cannot bear to see or read or hear about an animal that is cold or sad or hungry. This book had all of that but had such a tremendously powerful story that I plunged on.

This is about a father and son family unit. They do the best they can and yet the son makes a horrible choice with disastrous results. Grizz...the father...needs to know why. In this quest all of the other secrets and stories begin to unravel. Clara...the young pastor's pregnant wife... is involved in ways she can't even imagine. But she is an integral part of this unravelling. Old stories, coyotes, truths and half truths all play a role in this sometimes surreal novel.

Whew!

What I loved about this book...

I was so tortured by Seth...Grizz's tragic son. Clara's role was fascinating, too. I knew from the start that she was a key player but I wasn't sure how or why. That again is the mastery of this writer. The ending of this book is phenomenal. Oh...I loved all of the coyote stories, too.

What I did not love...

I was always afraid for the animals...the bull, the cows, the kittens, the coyotes...I wish I could tell you more about them but that would spoil the story.

Final thoughts...

I believe this novel to be one of the great ones...haunting story, flawed characters, evil...pure evil in a small town. Pretty much a must read in my book!

Little Wolves is a tough novel to explain. I understand why some people do not like to see the word “literary” used to describe a novel type but, for lack of a better word, I am going take the notion one step farther and will call this one “literary crime fiction” – or “literary thriller.” That is exactly what Little Wolves is: a character and setting-driven novel with a plot encompassing elements of both the mystery and thriller genres. It has an exciting story to tell, and it tells it in literary fashion.

Lone Mountain is one of those 1980s Minnesota prairie towns in which everyone pretty much knows the business of everyone else, a place where personal grudges are sometimes carried for decades, and even passed from one generation to the next. And when, shortly after the arrival of a new pastor and his wife, the town is shocked by the shotgun murder of Sheriff Will Gunderson by a local teen, a violent chain of events is unleashed that will finally expose the ugly core of this little community.

As Grizz Fallon, the young murderer’s father, tries to make sense of what his son has done, he learns how little he really knew about what was going on in the boy’s day-to-day world. But the more he discovers about his son and what drove him to kill, the more resistance Grizz gets from the remaining town sheriff, a man who has had it in for Grizz for a long time. Grizz, though, believes that he failed his son and, despite being warned to mind his own business, he will not rest until he knows the truth about what happened on that bloody morning.

Grizz is not the only one feeling guilty. Clara Warren, the new preacher’s wife, now believes she could have prevented the shooting if only she had had the courage necessary to do so. Clara, who has a strange personal connection to the town, encouraged her husband to take the Lone Mountain job for reasons she has not been entirely honest with her husband about. But the more she learns about her past, and its connections to the present, the closer she comes to cracking from all the pressure.

Thomas Maltman has written a complicated novel, one that can be read and enjoyed on several levels. The novel has the kind of action that most pleases thriller fans, and the mystery at its core is an intriguing one. Even better, it is filled with well-developed characters (of the hard-to-like, but easy-to-understand variety) and a complicated set of dual plots (filled with literary references) that tie together beautifully at the end.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should have called it a “literary page-turner.”½

More literary fiction than a mystery, this novel begins with a teenaged boy sawing off a shotgun and then killing the county sheriff before shooting himself. Kind of "we have to talk about Kevin" meets "Bent Road" with a touch of Louise Erdrich and some deeply creepy (and slightly OTT) stuff, too.Not quite sure what to think about this one.

This was such a well-written thriller with some of the loveliest (or should I say, grotesque) metaphors and similes I've come to read in quite some time, my favorite comparing a flight of stairs to the inside of a sick person's throat. The grammar was also impeccable--I don't think I found one mistake! The vocabulary was stunning, and when interwoven with Old English and mythology, you feel like you are sitting in the classroom of one of the main characters, Clara.

Speaking of characters, I was amazed at the characters in this novel, especially Clara and Grizz, although I had a fondness towards Lee, which I assume we are supposed to take on. Clara's voyage to find her mother's story while trying to figure out the story behind Seth, while trying to keep her life together pulled me in so much that I truly felt like just giving Clara a huge hug. That's when you know the author has created a great character.

The last thing I want to say about this book is the only reason I didn't give it five stars is because of the ending. I actually wanted a little bit of a twist, and perhaps other readers didn't expect this to happen, but after about a couple chapters in, I had it all figured out, but was hoping it wouldn't end that way. To my disappointment, it did.

This novel bounces between two generations in the 1800's in the Midwest (Minnesota is the Midwest isn't it?) The backdrop is around the time of the Dakota Sioux uprising in the late 1800's and the largest mass execution in US history. The story follows the struggles of the Senger family, and the Dakota tribe across the river from the family farm. The character, Asa Senger is a lonely 14-year-old boy. His father's sister Hazel comes to his parents' Minnesota home from an asylum. Asa learns through his aunt's stories all about his family's past, their German background and their divisions over slavery, Indian relations and other issues of times. He also learns about a relationship between Hazel and the Dakotan warrior Wanikiya that becomes closer even as violence escalates in the world around them. Asa in the end accepts his own complex heritage as an adult. This book would be a good addition to the high school LMC as an adult book that would make good reading for YA as well.