Book review: Sitka author John Straley brings together an intriguing mix of historical events — plus lively plots and conspiracy theories — in the novel “Blown by the Same Wind,” part of his Cold Storage series set in Southeast Alaska.
John Straley, one of Alaska’s best-known and best-loved writers, continues to deliver. Along with his eight , he’s now produced a fourth volume in the newer Cold Storage series. Cold Storage is his fictional Southeast Alaska town made up of boardwalks, fishing boats and a cannery, a bar and cafe, and a cast of oddball characters.
The plotting gets a little crazy — but never dull — when it ties into conspiracy theories related to the assassinations of both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Who are those Southern men with their white supremacist talk and interest in a leathery old mummy? What will Thomas Merton do to soothe the troubled waters?
One of Straley’s great gifts is his rendering of the real Alaska within his imagined world. In “Blown by the Same Wind” he writes convincingly of the landscape, bears and horses, boats and boat operations, floatplanes and flying, and weather. In riveting scenes well into the book, he describes in detail both a boat struggling through a stormy sea and a near-accident in a plane.
In one luscious passage, Merton witnesses a ball of light riding on top of a giant brown bear, a light that turns into a figure in a silk robe with hair “ornately arranged with something like lightning bolts pointing in every direction, as if she were balancing the weight of existence.
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