Book #131: Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Title: Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Author: Ivan Doig

I picked this book up cheap at an Audible sale a few months ago. I think it was $5, and for more than 15 hours of listening, that works out to be a little bit less than $.30/hour, which is a pretty good deal, in contrast to something like a first-release movie ($4.50/hour) or a day of skiing ($20/run the other day when I went with the kids). Ivan Doig is one of those authors about whom I've always heard a lot of good things, but I never got around to reading.

I'm really glad that I read Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Doig tells the story of Angus and Rob, friends from Scotland in the 1880s who decide to follow Rob's uncle to Montana. Once they arrive in the great wilderness, they become homesteaders, and the book follows the travails of the pair from youth to manhood. I absolutely loved the first 2/3 of the novel. Doig does a great job with his characters and with introducing plot elements that keep a reader turning pages (or, in my case, folding laundry). While the book centers on the relationship between Angus and Rob, it's Angus's tale, and the main secondary story is a love triangle that kept me aching for everyone involved, across time and space. The main drawback of the story is that while Rob is characterized so well in the first parts, he changes, for reasons not entirely explained, in a way that alters the action in the last third. I wish that his actions had been more consistent with the early Rob, or better explained because of a significant event in his life. I loved Angus's story, though, and was sad when the fifteen hours of the story drew to a close.