Head to Big Sky Country in Callan Wink's poignant coming of age novel, August, named after the title character, who sets off on his own after high school to make a life for himself on a ranch in Montana. August, a quiet and descriptive novel about a young man forging a life in a beautiful, yet barren land, devoid of those particulars that are usually of a young man's fancy, namely women, will appeal mostly to male readers and those who enjoy westerns. I found this book to be quite masculine in tone, with a reserved, stoic narrator and several instances of hunting and/or death, as well as many passages going into great detail about working the land and using machinery. With that said, this book fell outside of my preferred tastes, but may be quite insightful and meaningful to the right reader.

August, the main character in the book, reminds me of Ivan Doig characters. Men, often searching for more than what has been given to them. August is a manly man, just as Doig’s are. He has a brain and a conscience. As his mother slowly sinks into mental illness and his father really is just a big windbag with no parenting skills, Austin ends up following his mother from Michigan to Montana, where he’s the new kid in high school. What the reader takes away from this book is how August survived his growing up years surrounding by natural beauty and a variety of people who make August seem like the wisest person around.

This is a coming of age story of a boy, starting when was 12 on a Michigan dairy farm through his days on a Montana ranch. During this time August’s divorced parents had passages of their own. I wound up liking this book since I enjoyed the writing style which was simple but also contained some beautiful descriptions. I was also interested in the family dynamics. However, I almost abandoned the book in the first chapter when August’s father paid him to bash in the heads of cats and cut off their tails. I fast forwarded through that as fast as I could.

I don’t think I’m the ideal audience for this book since I really have a hard time relating to the hunting/fishing lifestyle and to the terrible or moronic things that males do. It wasn’t just the cat bashing, there was hunting and other casual animal killing, fishing, the joys of playing football, sex between teenagers and adults, a hit and run, various fights and gang rape. None of the criminal activity resulted in any consequences to the perpetrators by the way. So, the book was too rural and too male for me but I am rounding my 3.5 star rating up because of the parts of the book that I really liked.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

I never recovered from the mass cat killing near the beginning of the novel. Any farm kid knows to keep antifreeze away from pets, but what was the purpose of this horrific act? I very much wanted to like this book but it seemed to be nothing more than a series of antidotal farm life stories that really led to nowhere. There just wasn’t substance. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

The blurb for the book makes it a lot more mysterious and plot heavy than it really is. The book is reminiscent of the movie Boyhood, aka 12 years a boy, except it tracks the protagonist August for about 7 years of his life. A few years of his life are given a few paragraphs, whereas other years get several chapters. But the book is more a coming of age story about a boy and later a man who lets life happen to him rather than actively participating moreso than it is a revealing tale about the underbelly of small towns.

This book falls into a very specific genre I like to call, "literary silent stoic white male coming of age story in rural America" that is told in a way that puts distance between the reader and the characters and events. Not only does the writing style put a distance between the readers and the characters, but there's also a distance between August and the life he is living. August isn't a character that has strong reactions or thoughts on what is happening around him. Though there are moments that we get a glimpse of perhaps something more going on in August's head, for instance him choosing to go to Montana to work on the ranch, that insight disappears the longer he stays there. Sometimes another character will probe him on what his thoughts are about what is going on, but for the most part, August just flows through some major life events giving very little thought about what's going on.

It's the other characters that help define August as a character, or at least give us insight on the type of person August is. The people in his life are more active in terms of driving the story and getting him to do things. Whether it is his dad assigning him chores, his mom moving him away from his childhood home, his coach strong arming him to join the football team, or his boss giving him work - August passively goes along with all of these things. There are moments of resistance, but for the most part, he goes with what the stronger personality in his life asks of him. His reactions to what they say or do and his interactions with them are what help us better understand him. However using other people and big events to define the titular character and his coming of age as opposed to letting the reader get inside the character's head and thought process makes both the character and thus the book weaker. I do understand that part of it is because August himself was uncomfortable in his own skin and often preferred to be a loner. However, that is when an author needs to be willing to deep dive into the character's psyche and really explore the character's thoughts, dreams, wishes, desires. The aloofness that we're given may work with the younger versions of August, but it doesn't work with the older teenage version. We understand his work ethic because of the scenes he has with his father and his father as a character. We understand his slight inquisitive nature because of his scenes with his mother and her personality. But we're not really given much beyond what we've seen from his interactions.

Though I wouldn't say that this book is hyper-masculine, it is definitely written from a male point of view. With little nuggets of not quite wisdom and mediocre advice being passed from father to son or from friend to friend, making women seem like almost a different species than the men in their lives. These scenes don't degrade or denigrate, but there seems to be a belief that there's an insurmountable chasm that separates them. However, what was offputting was the gang-rape scene involving a drunk girl at a party in the woods. When a writer uses a girl getting raped as a way to develop a female character, it is tired and lazy. When a writer uses a girl getting raped as a way to develop a male character, it is offensive, tired, and lazy. When a writer uses a girl getting raped as just another slice of life scene and doesn't really develop a character, it is puzzling, offensive, tired, and lazy. The way that it was played off later by those involved was a bit victim shamey, but the fact that the conflict that arises as a result has more to do with the boys involved and their reactions than anything else was off-putting.

What I did like about the book was the description of the locations and scenes. While the author could have easily just used the nickname "Big Sky Country" to convey the awe that is the vastness of Montana, he doesn't. There is an obvious love and connection to the locations being written about.

This is very much a slice of life book that tries to tell a lot of story with a restrained pen. The restraint keeps the story from becoming overly complicated or clunky, but also perhaps keeps the reader from really getting invested in August as a character. The time that is skipped over may have not had anything momentous or life changing for August, but it would have allowed the reader to get to know August better as a person. One of my favorite slice of life books focusing on one character and a slow meander through his life is Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. Suttree is not significantly more dynamic a character than August, both having a detatched quality - however McCarthy's willingness to stay with Suttree through even the mundane aspects of his life is what makes Suttree come to life. Callan Wink does do a good job with the world and characters that he's pairing August up with, but the external world of August is not the problem.

I became a Callan Wink fan after reading his first book “Dog Run Moon,” a collection of short stories. Short stories are usually not one of my favorite reading categories, but those in “Dog Run Moon” really absorbed and impressed me. Wink is equally talented at writing full length fiction as “August” demonstrates. The book follows a teenage boy (August) from the family farm in Michigan to Montana in the company of his divorced mother. His father stays behind on the farm with his new girlfriend, a young woman he hired to help him milk cows. In Montana August adjusts to and comes to love the Montana mountains. “August realized that a landscape could shape your hopes and expectations for what life might possibly have to offer.”

During high school and even afterwards, August feels like an outsider and struggles with how to fit in and how to conduct his life. “He thought that if everyone in the world felt this way it wouldn’t be so bad, he could chalk it up as a reality of the human condition, but as far as he could tell, everyone else was fine and it was just him that couldn’t find a way to properly live. Most of the time he didn’t want to be in his own company, but he couldn’t think of any good way out of it.” Rather than go to college as his parents want, August takes a job on a remote cattle ranch and begins to approach adulthood and plan his future.

Wink’s descriptions of the landscape are realistic and magnificent, and may draw visitors to Montana just as Brad Pitt did. (Wink includes a funny passage about Pitt and Montana.) The characters are so authentic that they feel like people you know. Although August experiences some of the same adolescent growing pains that are typically represented in coming of age novels, the environment, the type of work he does, his parents, and the people he encounters add a welcome depth and originality. Highly recommended.

My review was posted on Goodreads on 4/22/20.

https://artsfuse.org/199271/book-review-august-a-rewarding-curiosity-in-the-ordinary/

(I do not assign stars)

This is a beautifully written coming of age story that will appeal to those especially interested in ranching in Montana. Beware, up front, that there are acts of violence toward animals and there is a sexual assault of a young woman. August, whose mother is mentally unstable and whose father isn't present even when he is, essentially raises himself. You follow along with him- much of this might seem prosaic but the language elevates it. Wink has a talent for making not only the human characters but the environment in which they move come alive. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. An excellent read and I'm looking forward to more from Wink.

In "August," Callan Wink has written something of a modern coming of age story interspersed with elements of a Western. The titular character is worth getting to know through these pages and readers will identify with the paths he takes to find himself (work, love, travel, education). Wink is gifted at both setting a scene and showing the interior workings of a character. I would have enjoyed the work more if it had not begun, however, with images of animal cruelty which I found hard to get past despite them being a small part of the work.

August is your average twelve-year-old growing up on his parents’ Michigan dairy farm. He’s hard-working, loves his mom and dad, and is average at school. This doesn’t sound like much of a story, but thanks to Callan Wink’s intuitive, quiet, and blunt manner of writing, this quickly becomes a heart wrenching human drama that puts a weight on your chest and a burden on your conscience.
August watches from a distance as his parents’ marriage crumbles, his father’s values lessen and his mother’s mental stability weakens. At a point he can no longer tolerate it, he sets out on his own, ending up in Montana, where he lives and learns lessons light-years beyond his age.
This is a beautifully written saga of five formative years in a young man’s life. With vivid and flawed characters, Wink creates a panorama where August soon realizes that even though he’s the youngest, he may actually be the wisest.
(I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for making it available.)

This is the story of a boy named August, mainly his life from around age 12 to around age 20.  This boy named August has a pretty nondescript life:  he lives on a farm with his parents (who live in separate residences on the property), he kills wild cats to gain the affections of his father while trying to catch the attention of his distant mother; he is part of a nasty, unreported crime; he moves to another state and lives a somewhat obscure and uneventful life, relishing in the simplicity of nature and living in anonymity.

So why the four stars??

The writing, pure and simple.  This is the first story I've read from Callan Wink, and it will not be the last.  His storytelling reminds me of Jim Harrison, one of my favorite authors.  I will admit there were several times I questioned why Wink was going a certain direction, why the mundane was highlighted.  But at the end of the novel, I understood the method behind the madness and I fell in love with a young man named August and his honest and heartfelt story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for sending me an electronic copy for review. You can find this and all of my other reviews at https://alldragonsread2.home.blog

Man this book was not for me, and I am so disappointed by that because I was really looking forward to it after seeing some glowing early reviews. First of all, I’ve seen a few people warn animal lovers about the cat stuff at the beginning; why is no one warning about the brutal sexual assault?? A high school girl is gang-raped at a party about 1/3 of a way into Callan Wink’s August, and 200 pages of ranching and talking about the weather does not redeem it. After that scene I had a hard time enjoying anything about the book, and the fact that I have little interest in erecting fences or baling hay didn’t help. To me, the whole thing felt like it had no depth. I got to the end and didn’t know what the point was. I didn’t connect with any of the characters and found most of them to be nothing more than quick plot devices (especially the women and LGBTQ characters). I think I was just really not the target demographic for this novel...maybe if I were a 24 year old man who lived on a ranch in Minnesota I would feel differently about it? But I am myself, and I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends. Thanks Netgalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I received this from Netgalley.com for a review.

August doesn't have too much to say as life whirls around him. We follow August as he maneuvers through his parents divorce, a major move from Michigan to Wyoming as a teen and learning how to ranch as a young adult and coming of age.

Good story, quiet and powerful. Just living life. I had to chuckle (and had a bit of déjà vu) every time August discussed the weather with his dad.

4☆

Callan Wink deserves, in my opinion, every award and fellowship awarded to him. AUGUST, Wink's first novel, is a joy to read. I admit to a lack of interest in YA literature; however, this new book was an excellent read. CW's writing style is perfect, and even when I am learning about farm equipment (not in a million years did I think I would), he kept me there glued to every word.

A bit of background about August is that he lived on a Michigan dairy farm with his parents until he decided to go out on his own. He made it to Montana and spent a good number of years growing up and learning how to ranch. The descriptions of guys he worked with and came across in the local tavern provided some potential violence, but August didn't go further than necessary to get out of a scrape.

August was a loner, going back to high school. He sometimes felt lonely but enjoyed nature, fishing, and listening to other fools' long questionable stories about life. August was shy with women but always treated them as he would want to be treated (a man who lived the Golden Rule).

AUGUST is a life lesson for readers of all ages. It is a literary masterpiece that has nothing to do with millennials, cities, or success. It is a good story about life. I recommend this book to everyone who likes to read a good story.

Thank you to Callan Wink, Random, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

"August" by Callan Wink is a beautiful and provocative coming-of-age novel. Wink's prose is absolutely gorgeous. The writing flows so effortlessly. No awkward dialogue or clunky descriptions. The title is named after the protagonist and the novel spans through his formative and early adulthood years. Some people might have a problem with the pacing, it's a slow-burn but it's never boring or predictable. I liked that August was always truly himself. As a reader, you might not always like him and the choices he makes, but he's painfully human. He is withdrawn, infallible, stoic, and reserved, but is never afraid to experience change and freedom at any costs. There were a couple of scenes that were tough to get through like the scene in the barn with the feral cats, and the scene at a bonfire party involving a sexual assault. Otherwise than that, I really felt emotionally invested in August's upbringing and rocky journey through adolescence. The one drawback was the length of novel. It felt long even though it wasn't long. "August" wasn't a masterpiece but it definitely tugged on my heartstrings. Deep and meaningful. Callan Wink is a talented author and whatever he decides to publish next, I will be the first one to read it.

Thank you, Netgalley and Random House for the digital ARC.

Release date: March 31, 2020

I would shelve this book near Lean on Pete. Dramatic without excessive drama, engaging characters that you probably wouldn't want to live with, steady evolution of the main character in the face of what could be toxic people and situations. Sounds like another version of the hero's journey, doesn't it? This is a short, lean novel that is propulsive without stalling or going off the road. I loved it.

This covers the life of August with book starting out as August being a baby bump and progresses to the time of age of 12 living and growing up on the family dairy farm in Michigan. He has been taught the value of hard work. Now as most people when it comes to farms and ranches life and death are just a part life. Those have a fondness for cats may find one of August first jobs on the farm a little disturbing but get past this part and move on. August Mom and Dad even though the are living on the farm they are not living together and the are slowly drifting apart especially so when his father takes a liking to farm hand he hires to help on the farm she is not much older than August. When August Mother finally has enough they decide to move to Montana when she has an opportunity to work at a library. This is definitely a coming of age story as you read about August coming out of his shell and learning about life and love and working as a ranch hand coming out of high school. It seems to make things a little more complicated for him when his first girlfriend if you can call her that is his moms best friend.

For me this is a story that I cannot put my finger as to why but this a definite page turner and smooth read that I read in a day. It is a good read and worth your time.