| Dick Estell The Radio Reader Public Radio's Reading Program |
| The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig Harcourt, Inc., NY 2006 Airs September 22 thru October 30, 2006 |
"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the newspaper ad offering the services
of an A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition that draws the
hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the
unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling
Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias
Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big
Ditch — a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie
bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is
pressed into service, setting the stage for the several kinds of education — none
of them of the textbook variety — Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three
sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse.
A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic
institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative
best.
of an A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition that draws the
hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the
unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling
Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias
Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big
Ditch — a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie
bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is
pressed into service, setting the stage for the several kinds of education — none
of them of the textbook variety — Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three
sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse.
A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic
institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative
best.
| Ivan Doig |
| Photo: Marion Ettlinger |
| (fiction) |
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