I've been through Idaho, and read much about its wonderful trout fishing. I even met a teacher from Moscow, Idaho who I found to be perfectly intelligent. I am glad to say I have no experience with the Idaho depicted in Brian Hart's new novel Then Came The Evening.
Hart's characters are meth fueled and pain marked, oppressed by family strife that runs deeper than any trout stream and is harder than any mountainside.
When Tracy Doerner shows decides to reclaim his dead grandparent's failing homestead, he finds the work is not as hard as the emotional upheaval he must endure. His father Bandy, incarcerated and without prospects, never knew the son he shared with his estranged and drug addled ex-wife Iona.
When Tracy falls off the roof of the dilapidated farmhouse, the family's sharply divided trajectory angles back on one another, bringing the past to weigh on the future. Bandy, banged up in prison, finds himself drawn to Tracy, the son he didn't know, as well as to Iona, the meth-head who's traded drugs for a shot at restoration.
Hart, a first time novelist, gets bogged down in minutia on occasion, but drags the story out of the dirt long enough to outline believable characters mired in regrettable circumstances.
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