Book #17

Ricochet River
by Robin Cody

I went all literary and scholarly and stuff with this one; I read Ricochet River, one of the favored teaching novels of my compatriot, Gerry Tinkle, and one of the top 100 Oregon novels (Because there have been, what, 102 Oregon novels total? 103?). All I can say after finishing it is, Tinkle's welcome to it. I mean, I can see the up side in reading a novel that is set where you live, and this one basically is, though I think it's supposed to be on the other side of Portland, closer to The Dalles and places like that (Not that I really know where The Dalles is, just that any place name that includes "The" is incredibly awkward to say, and therefore The Dalles sucks. Just like The Hague.) and I'm sure the jocks love this book since it's about being a sports hero in a small town in addition to being a teenager in a small town. But since I didn't grow up here and I don't fish, and I never watched salmon swim up river and spawn, and since I do not know what it's like to play in the BIG GAME with the whole town watching you, and since I don't like people who do those things, I didn't enjoy the book very much. But at least it had a totally crappy Separate Peace-like death for the hero, the narrator's best friend and worst enemy, Jesse Howl: he tried climbing a tree in a lumberjack competition, with the spikes and the belt, when he was drunk -- and he went flying off the top of the log and killed himself. Utterly stupid, just like the rest of the book.

Nah, that's too harsh. It actually had its good points. It did have some nice descriptions of the area around here, the forest and the river and such, and the stories of the salmon being trapped by the dams actually were quite touching and sad; the main character (Who really is a jock dumbass and who I really didn't like) has a good girlfriend who he doesn't deserve and an amusing grandfather that I liked reading about, though didn't particularly like. But the grandfather had this great speech about survival of the fittest: how in some circumstances (He was talking about salmon trapped upriver by a dam) the ones who are fittest, who struggle and fight, are not the ones who survive: the lazy ones who sit on their butts and do nothing are the ones who never face danger and who survive.

Overall, like I said: Tinkle can have it.