Thanks NetGalley for the ARC of Fire Exit by Morgan Talty, published by Penguin Random House Canada
I enjoyed this novel, it is told well, I like the author's writing style. I liked the characters and the setting and the description of people and places.
The story's main character Charles, experiences many events as the author describes his life both past and present. The author lays the story out nicely and leaves the reader to use their imagination for certain outcomes. I liked the way the characters conversed with each other, sometimes blunt and to the point, like real life.
I would absolutely read more books by this author

4.5 stars
This book was very character driven. It wasn't particularly exciting; it wasn't fast paced. But I was never bored. It was easy to pick up and feel absorbed. I wanted to know how Charles would find his daughter. I wanted to know if his relationship with his mother would improve. I wanted to know how he would carry on because I cared about him. He lived on the edge of two cultures, never really feeling a sense of belonging in either. It was a very interesting perspective.

We begin with a wish. An urge to speak the truth and share a story. Charles sits on his porch across the river from the daughter he wasn't allowed to raise. He sits and watches just as he's watched her grow. To her, he's a white man who lives across the river from the Penobscot Reservation.

Charles wants her to know who he is but has he really thought this through? What about her wants? Or the mother’s? Or the man who has been raising her for more than 20 years? That's not all he has to consider. He has an always-drunk friend mulling about, and a mother who is descending deeper into dementia each day.

The past, both known and unknown, told and untold, is ever present in the relationships, minds, and actions of these characters. This is neither a slow burn nor a blistering comet. Fire Exit simmers at just the right temperature to keep you engaged from start to finish.

With powerful, hard hitting lines and poignant observations about life, Morgan Talty masterfully tells a story about the stories that make up our lives. About what happens to our spirits or souls when we live with interrupted or incomplete stories.

Stories are in our blood. They are the truths we are made of, they bind us to some, allow us to connect with others. Be willing to share, be willing to listen. You won't regret this book.

Charles was raised on the Penobscot reservation by his white mother and Indigenous stepfather but was forced to leave at 18 since he is not, by blood, Indigenous. He has moved across the river from where he can see the reservation. Now in his fifties, he is wracked by guilt and a sense of loss, trying to overcome a long estrangement from his mother and forced to keep secrets including of a daughter, whose Indigenous mother chose to leave him so that she could raise her on the reservation, and who doesn’t know about him.

Told in two timelines and in the first voice by Charles, Fire Exit by Morgan Talty is a beautifully written, powerful, and poignant novel about a man who is both part of and separated from his community by blood, by secrets, and by the river that flows between them. The characters are fully drawn with backstories and with flaws that make them both relatable and redeemable. The story is often dark and bleak as Charles recounts his sense of loss of his home, his past, his mother who is sinking into dementia but mostly of his daughter but it is also always infused with the love he wants to share with her. This is, in many ways, a very emotional even melancholic tale but never crosses the line into melodrama and ends on a hopeful note. I read an ebook of this novel while listening to the audiobook narrated by Darrell Dennis who does an amazing job of giving Charles a voice.

I received an e-arc of this novel from Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada and an audiobook from RB Media in exchange for an honest review

This is a rich and powerful book. The narrative voice is authentic and raw. Charles doesn't leave out his own indiscretions, nor does he leave out how his actions may have affected others. This is a book about lies and secrets, how family withholds truth from another person, and how that omission affects us. Charles wants his daughter to know the truth about herself, but underneath that narrative runs the desire for his own knowing of a past story, his own story. Unfortunately his mother has just been diagnosed with dementia and often can't even remember who he is.

The skillful telling of this story made me constantly wonder what Louise (his mother) is hiding. What secret she is keeping from Charles. I loved how the narrative moved back and forth in time, leaving me with even more questions as the story progress.

This will be an author I'll want to read whatever he writes!

Thank you NetGalley for giving me this ARC!

This story has depth. Though slow, it takes the reader down the path of finding identity, and loyalty to family. The story of the son and the mother is heartbreaking, the son's devotion to his mother heartfelt. Talty knows how to weave a story

I really struggled with this one. It took me longer than normal to finish as I just kept setting it aside.

While the premise of the book was interesting and had potential, I just found myself struggling to connect with or care about any of the characters. The book is about the struggles Charles has faced, being removed from the reservation and never being allowed to know his daughter. Unfortunately, I just found the entire book slow and depressing.

Thank you Netgalley for an ARC of Fire Exit. As always, all thoughts are my own.

I really enjoyed Night of the Living Rez by Penobscot Nation member, Morgan Talty and was excited to see how he would move from short stories to a novel. I am happy to say he has done so very successfully!

Following Charles who sits on the side of the river opposite the reservation, we see him watching as his daughter who has been raised by her indigenous mother and by a man who is also indigenous, grows up. Due to blood quantum rules, Elizabeth needs to have two parents from the reserve and Charles is white. She doesn’t know about her birth father and now watching his adult daughter, Charles wants to tell her her history. Charles is also dealing with a mother who is suffering dementia and depression and a best friend who is an alcoholic. This story is not so much about what happens if/when he tells her but rather the process of going through life not being able to tell his daughter about him and how it affects him. Of equal importance to the story is the relationship he has with his mother and the guilt he feels about the death of his stepfather.

The imagery Talty puts forward is vivid and the characters clear. He holds back on several occasions in sharing the what happens next which created some curiosity but perhaps not the level of drama that the writer intended. This didn’t bother me much as I most enjoy character driven stories and while I need plot to drive the story forward, do not focus on that as much. I am curious how other readers will find the plot for this one.

The highlight of Fire Exit for me was the story of his mother and her dementia and lifelong depression and how Charles saw himself through her eyes. Charles seems to have made a vow to himself to always attend to someone’s requests/needs after losing his stepfather. He regularly drives his friend home from the pub and makes himself available to his mom as much as he can.

Thank you to @netgalley and @knopfca for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinions. Fire Exit comes out June 4, 2024.

This is a novel about Charles a non-native that lives across the river from his one-time mistress Mary, her husband Roger and unknowing daughter Elizabeth, who live on the reserve. Charles a terminal bachelor is agonized with telling Elizabeth that he is her biological father. Charles mother Louise has suffered her entire life from depression but now is showing signs of dementia and more often doesn’t recognize him as himself. Charles’ friend Bobby, a mostly drunkard, likes Louise and feels she is the mother he never had, and sometimes looks after her. Things come to head when Charles’ decision to tell, forces Roger and Mary to take action. “We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them —the ones that make us—-how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” Despite Charles not being allowed into Elizabeth’s life, he never stopped thinking about her wellbeing. I loved this about Charles. This is a touching story about relationships and family history. 4.5 out of 5 stars!

I found this melancholy book, written in the first person, a very intriguing read. Although sad throughout, there is hope and joy too. Morgan Tally’s main character Charles is conflicted , yet articulate and wise in his working through his thoughts on his upbringing on a reserve while not being of native “ bloodline “. The questions he presents to the reader are so very honest and they challenged me at every turn.

This was a very good book. I was hooked from the first page.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for an ARC of this novel.

This quiet, melancholic story is about Charles Lamosway, son of the depressive Louise and a father he doesn’t remember, and adoptive son of Fredrick, of Maine’s Penobscot tribe. On one level, it is a story about belonging and boundaries. Where does the white Charles ‘fit’, growing up on the reservation with a beloved Native stepfather who is always there during his mother’s frequent lapses into deep depression, who tends to both so lovingly, who ultimately puts his life on the line to cover for him? Fredrick is his assurance of belonging; his death separates him emotionally from his mother and community. He blames himself. Louise, left adrift, claims not to blame him but does.

On a terrible snowy night, Charles had refused to accompany Fredrick on his fatal hunting trip because he was waiting for news that would also serve as a badge of belonging and one of exile. His daughter Elizabeth (Ellie) was born. He had agreed with her mother, Mary, that he would not claim paternity because for the baby’s sake. To do so, with the state’s imposition of ‘blood quantum’ regulations, would strip their child of all Penobscot rights and make her. Like Charles, she would be someone who belonged nowhere, a human being with no claims to her own history and culture, and no status.

This secret, that he keeps even from his mother, eats away at his soul as he sinks into alcoholism, self-loathing, and grief. His sole consolation is discretely watching the little family that might have been his across the narrow river that physically separates their homes. He tells himself his watchful obsession is for Elizabeth’s sake, but her adoptive father Roger (whom she believes to be her biological father) is as good to her as Fredrick had always been to him. After much pleading, Mary brings her to visit Charles when she is three. The visit, for which he prepares meticulously, does not go well. He has no further contact for 20 years, sadly watching her grow up across the river.

But blood, eventually, will out in other ways. Although a successful young teacher and homeowner, Ellie’s own depressive demons bring her into ECT treatment just as Louise, with whom Charles has re-connected, also undergoes ECT. Mary, Ellie, and the by-now mostly lost in dementia Louise connect briefly, as strangers do in hospital waiting rooms. Only Mary and the immobilized Charles know their true connection. But Charles now becomes convinced that his daughter has to know the missing pieces of her own story. And his mother, who frequently forgets her own son, must know her grandchild before it is too late.

There is no Hollywood ending, with the requisite all-is-forgiven joyful reunion. This is the story of all too many lives, perhaps even more so among the colonized Native American peoples. Resolutions, if they come at all, are hard to attain, take up lifetimes, and are imperfect. But that is the beauty of this quiet, tender novel. There is suffering, there is injustice, there are desperate secrets. Sadness, regret and self-recrimination are woven throughout. Fredrick and Roger, the two stepfathers, say little and are mostly absent; Fredrick dies when Charles is barely 18, and Roger is largely seen quietly caring for his family across the river. Yet these selfless big-hearted men are beacons in the darkness that surrounds Charles. These men embody Native American culture’s expansive notion of family and of children as blessings to all. His mother, her disturbed neighbour, his profoundly alcoholic friend Bobby, his troubled childhood friend Gizos—all bring kindness and comfort in their own ways.

This seems a simple story, simply recounted by Charles, that delves into his past as much as his present. It also points forward to possible futures exactly where none seem possible. In the hands of a truly skilled storyteller, underlying love and hope are also ever present. Some things can never be changed, but some can. Fire destroys, but it also purifies and leaves new spaces for old—the needed ‘exit.’ This novel by Morgan Talty, who is of Penobscot heritage, is one of the year’s best.

I had a bit of trouble following the timeline. It jumped around a lot I found. The characters seem relatable even tho the main character seems very passive. It read like a memoir not a novel. The main character has a lot going on. A white man living on a reserve who has his child living her mother and another father to her her part of the culture. A mother who has dementia and fight’s alcoholism. Unresolved issues with a step father who dies in a hunting accident. It’s a lot to take in.
If you like a slow burn memoir style story this is definitely for you.