This is a wonderful, funny, touching story about Brandon Vanderkool, a young, severely dsylexic Border Patrol officer in Washington state. Brandon sees the world differently from most people and his dsylexia makes speaking and understanding others a challenge at times.

Accompanying Brandon in this story of cross-border drug smuggling, illegal migration and friendships, are Canadian and American families living with various illnesses, economic challenges and personal relationships.

Brandon's parents (Norm and Jeannette) are running a struggling dairy farm and dealing with Jeannette's memory loss. Brandon's friend Madeleine Rousseau is involved in drug smuggling and struggling to keep her life on an even keel. They, and all the other characters along the border, are well drawn and add to the richness of this story. ( )

I loved Brandon - he's so genuine. His gift of observation delivers many arrests for the border patrol and results in bewilderment for him. He's not sure that it's to anyone's benefit except perhaps his supervisors who are racking up more arrests than they dreamed of. The families along the Washington/Canada border are all interesting - failed dairy farms, mcmansions and a thriving underground pot economy, not to mention the iimmigrants alogn the border. Brandon's own father and mother fight battles with illness and problems with the herd, including beloved Pearl. His childhood friend Madeline becomes involved in the pot production and her father trys to duplicate Einsteins experiments. All in all, Lynch has written a character rich quirky story of people who just don't quite fit in with mainstream Canada or America - I enjoyed every one of them. ( )

Sometimes confusing account of lives on the Washington State/Canadian border. Marijuana and immigration problems beset a young Dyslexic Border Patrol Officer, Brandon Vanderkool, but it is his attraction to a beautiful but lost Canadian drug-runner that captured my sympathy. Beautifully written character development; Brandon's personality and sensitivity make the book a fascinating read. ( )

In Border Songs, Jim Lynch deftly paints a portion of the Canadian-U.S. border that separates Washington from British Colombia. Tension caused by politics and the U.S. effort to secure the border has driven a rift between communities and friends that for years were used to hopping the ditch that constitutes a section of the border to visit between countries. Now a nub of a joint thrown across the ditch in derision, or a late-night incursion to shoot out a new border camera are what passes for interaction, except for the constant flow south of smuggled bodies and loads of B.C. Bud, which the U.S. Border Patrol does its best to stop. Brandon Vanderkool is a new Border Patrol agent who just happened to grow up in Blaine within spitting distance of the border, and still lives there with his parents on the failing family dairy farm.

Brandon is a 6’ 8”, 23 year old, severely dyslexic, sensitive innocent who watches birds obsessively. He paints birds, and everyone he has arrested, and creates temporary sculptures from natural materials, sometimes on duty, which results in an embarrassing incident. He also happens to be extraordinarily skilled at catching smugglers. Brandon’s mother is losing her memory. His father is struggling with the farm and the temptation of easy money to be made by looking the other way. Brandon is unused to the attention he is getting by making high-profile arrests, and is trying to reconnect with Madeline Rousseau, a Canadian childhood friend turned bud smuggler. ( )

I lost count of how many times the novel “Confederacy of Dunces” popped into my head as I read Jim Lynch’s “Border Songs,” but I do not mean anything even remotely negative about Border Songs when I say that. Lynch’s new novel has a certain “Confederacy of Dunces” vibe about it that will appeal to fans of that memorable John Kennedy Toole novel of almost thirty years ago – and that is a good thing.

Unusual physical specimens, big men generally perceived by their friends and families to be of the hapless misfit variety, anchor both novels. And as Toole did for his “Dunces” hero, Lynch surrounds Brandon Vanderkool with quirky characters and plops the lot of them into a unique part of the country – two countries, actually – a little rural community living on both sides of the Washington/British Columbia border.

Brandon Vanderkool, six foot eight and so dyslexic that he speaks parts of his sentences backward in times of stress, is a loner whose father pushes him from the family’s small dairy farm into a job with the U.S. Border Patrol. Suddenly, Brandon is responsible for protecting the very border along which he has spent his entire life and, to everyone’s surprise, he turns out to be a natural. As a passionate bird watcher, he is so finely attuned to the comings and goings of the local bird population that he almost unconsciously senses when something is out of place. That sense of place allows Brandon to become one of the stars of the Border Patrol, a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to stopping illegal aliens and pot from crossing the border from the Canadian side. Brandon’s duties with the Border Patrol, though, bring him into daily contact with people he has known all his life, many of whom who still ridicule him out of habit and find it difficult to accept his new position of authority despite all his success.

“Border Songs” is a character driven novel and Jim Lynch has populated his little international community with some good ones. Brandon’s father, Norm, whose dairy herd is desperately ill, is shocked and even a little embarrassed by all the attention Brandon is getting around town. Norm, by nature a dreamer and a worrier, is also terrified at how rapidly Brandon’s good-natured mother is losing her memory. Madeline Rousseau, to whom Brandon still imagines he has a special bond, grew up within sight of Brandon’s house but on the Canadian side of the ditch separating the two countries. Now, though, she works for a major pot smuggler and she and Brandon are on different sides of the border in more than one sense.

Madeline’s father, a retired professor, stays busy these days yelling anti-American slogans across the ditch at Norm and trying to replicate great inventions of the past by meticulously recreating the original step-by-step research of the actual inventors. Then there is Sophie, the newly arrived masseuse and gossip collector who video tapes interviews with willing customers and seems to be the only person on either side of the border who has the big picture.

“Border Songs” is a comic look at life on an international border, in this case, a border that is nothing more than a drainage ditch serving the two countries it divides. It is a clear reminder that, while borders are important and necessary, their effects are sometimes absurd, especially when seen through the eyes of those who live so near them.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

Brandon Vanderkool’s colleagues on the US Border Patrol rightly call him a “s--- magnet.” A newbie agent on a 30-mile sector between Washington and British Columbia (where the international border is sometimes a mere ditch between neighbors’ yards), Brandon is freakishly tall, dyslexic and probably autistic, an avid birder and artist -- with eyes that are “really, really wide open […] it’s like he expects something to happen at every moment, no matter where he is or what he’s doing.”

And happen it does -- from stumbling upon trucks full of illegal immigrants while searching for solitude, to finding contraband where he’s birding -- all to the reader’s amazement and amusement, but to Brandon’s utter dismay since his disabilities make the paperwork and notoriety a nightmare. But when he happens upon a stolen car with a Middle-Eastern driver, a trunkful of explosives, and a map to Seattle’s Space Needle, everything changes. The Feds descend, the Patrol gathers reinforcements, and local social and political stresses heat to a boil.

Still, it’s a comic boil, deepened by subplots involving a terrific set of secondary characters and eclectic townspeople. A thoughtful, engaging, and thoroughly entertaining read. ( )

Marcia Lane Purcell:
Even though the Advance Reading Copy (ARC) is designed to make you get a jump on the publication of the book itself - to get you to talk about the book - to spread the good word -- in general, help to SELL the book -- there are very few ARCs that I can remember that literally start off with four solid pages of praise. This praise is not all in-house either. Most of it comes from bookstore staff across the country and contains phrases like, "a truly wonderful and thoughtful novel," "in a class by itself," "beautifully rendered scenes," "curious, brilliant, often visionary characters," and lest I built it up TOO much, I'll close the quotes with this one: "I savored every chapter, every character, every lovely sentence, every plot twist and turn. It is a superbly crafted novel…" Brandon Vanderkool is the heart and soul of this story. At 6'8" and extremely dyslexic, he doesn't seem a likely choice to take center stage, and he does have a lot of competition from the assortment of characters populating this novel. I won't even attempt to describe the plot. Suffice it to say that there's a lot going on around the U.S./Canadian border in the Pacific Northwest and Brandon is pushed by his father into the very thick of it when he joins the Border Patrol. Also there is a perfect marriage between book and cover. Kudos to the selection of Walton Ford's Falling Bough (2008) as the painting which draws you into the book.