I thoroughly enjoyed this quiet, rich book about characters in Greenstone, a small dying mining town not far from Lake Superior, told in first person POV by Virgil Wander, a man approaching middle age. It reminds me a bit in tone of A MAN CALLED OVE, though Virgil is more cheerful and almost childlike at times in his openness to the world and to others. One day Virgil drives his car off the road, to find himself rescued but with a concussion that has changed him. He runs the old movie theater, the Empress (made me think of that movie, *Cinema Paradiso*), where he still plays films from reels. The characters are carefully drawn, unusual and interesting--Rune, the man who flies kites and is in search of the truth about his missing son Alec; Nadine, the beauty for whom Virgil has carried a torch for years, based on a flawed memory; the teenage boys Bjorn and Galen who do the weird things we expect of teenage boys. One strong point of this book was, for me, the nuanced and delicate language, the perfect turns of phrase. Sentences are never as powerful when taken out of context, but here are a few of the many I underlined: "For more than twenty years I'd felt at home, in my home. Now I stood weirdly slack in the middle of my kitchen ... The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced." "I moved here largely because of the inland sea ... Who could resist that wide throw of horizon, the columns of morning steam?" "He had a hundred merry crinkles at his eyes and a long-haul sadness in his shoulders." "A scatter of sparrows surfed along in the torrent, dipped and spun, and were gone." I was sorry to have this book end.
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