English Creek opening is a great celebration of Rain!

Sheep (with no compassion for the creatures) are woven in with the gentle adventures of
The McCaskill Family and indelible descriptions of The Two Medicine lands, reefs, and mountains.

While rodeos are tough to get through, Ivan Doig delivers a Classic Fourth of July,
with Jick's Mother's rousing speech a real surprise to characters and readers!

The hand drawn map works perfectly to check on scenery locations and families.

Readers may still wonder why good man Varick McCaskill did not quietly insist to Stanley
that he request a transfer or leave of absence or help him find another job instead of turning him in.

As well, while Alec's eventual demise was fairly predictable, adding the death of Varick was an unfortunate ending to his story.
For this favorite character, we would have wanted his impact in the 3rd book of the trilogy. ( )

A tale told by 14-year old Jick McCaskill, growing up in the “Two Medicine” country of Montana. Pretty good evocation of locale and local customs. Sort of a “Boy’s Life” story. First installment of a trilogy. ( )

English Creek by Ivan Doig is the first book in the author’s Montana Trilogy and was originally published in 1984. The story takes place in the summer of 1939, during that brief period of time between the Great Depression and the start of World War II. Set in the fictional English Creek District of Montana, the story unfolds through the eyes of Jick McCaskill, the fourteen year old son of the local National Forest Ranger. As in all of Ivan Doig’s books, the author puts as much emphasis on setting and atmosphere as he does on characters and plot. He carefully links the people, the land, the weather, the history and the current conditions into a vivid and heartfelt story.

The book opens with Jick’s older brother, Alex, announcing that he has decided not to go to college that Fall but instead is planning to marry his girlfriend, Leona. He has a job as a cowhand on a neighbour’s ranch but isn’t earning much. Jick’s parents are united in their disapproval and Jick, a dutiful youth, is left to ponder the situation and the changes that are happening in his family. From accompanying his father into the back country to count the sheep being herded on National Forest land, to the local Fourth of July celebrations and the back breaking work of haying season, the story paints a strong picture of rural life as it was in the 1930s.

English Creek isn’t an adventure story, instead it puts the reader in a specific place and time. The slow pace of the book mirrors the times when people didn’t rush through their days. Time is taken to speak with visitors, listen to stories and to puzzle out one’s thoughts and actions. I enjoyed this story and look forward to reading the other two books in the trilogy. ( )

This is a coming-of-age story set in Depression-era Montana. It’s the first published book, though in chronological order it is book two, in Doig’s Two Medicine Trilogy, which chronicles the McCaskill family over several generations. Jick McCaskill tells the story of his youth, focusing on the summer of 1939, when he was fourteen, and his family faced some challenges: “where all four of our lives made their bend.”

Doig really puts the reader into the era and landscape of this novel. The sky is vast, the landscape majestic, the weather sometimes brutal, and the dangers – both natural and manmade – palpable.

Jick is a keen observer, if sometimes perplexed. I love his descriptions of various events – accompanying his father as he “counts” the sheep, helping a wounded camp tender, tasting his first alcohol, enjoying the Fourth of July town picnic and rodeo. And I love how he’s so “consumed” by food. This boy is ALWAYS hungry! He’s also curious and continues to question those around him trying to ferret out the information he needs to piece together the puzzle that is his family’s history. He’s young enough that he still feels “responsible” for many things that happen, and consequently naïve enough to think he can affect the outcome with a well-chosen word.

There were times when Doig’s work made me think on my own father, and how he taught us love of the land and nature. That made the book all the more enjoyable for me. ( )

This is listed as No.1 in Doig's McCaskill trilogy, but I believe that Dancing at the Rascal Fair is first in chronological, if not publication, order. One hot summer in the Montana mountains is featured here, as the narrator recalls how he spent the last "free" season before Europe erupted in a second World War, and big changes came to his family. This is a dense rich story, of a boy learning to be a man; working with his father, a member of the US Forest Service--counting sheep herds, provisioning remote camps, worrying through fire season and playing flunky to the cook at a tense fire-fighters' camp--and with his rancher uncle during a month of cutting, raking and stacking the winter's supply of hay. Along the way, he finds he can be as resourceful as the environment requires, and through his own persistence, also learns some things about his family's past that the adults have been inclined to keep buried. ( )