February 28, 2022
Roorbach’s sprawling latest (after the collection The Girl of the Lake) focuses on a white girl’s coming-of-age and the men in her life. At 16, in the late 1990s, Cindra Zoeller is charged as an accomplice for armed robbery with her boyfriend, Dag, the older brother of a schoolmate. Dag, who is Puerto Rican, gets 20 years, while Cindra is sent to a Montana camp for juvenile delinquents. There she meets 20-something Lucky, who works as the camp’s driver, whom she initially takes to be Crow before learning he’s half Chinese and half white, and was raised by an adoptive Crow woman on the reservation. After learning the camp doctor regularly molests the girls, Cindra enacts a plan to stop him. Later, she escapes with Lucky’s help. Roorbach disturbingly writes Lucky as a noble savage type: though illiterate, he has supreme wilderness survival skills, and he’s a virgin. Of course, the pair’s idyllic time hunting, fishing, telling stories, and having sex won’t last, and Cindra faces great hardships in later years. Though the author has a knack for describing the natural beauty of the landscape, the mess of episodic scenes and backstories drags this down. This has its moments, but there isn’t much in the way of staying power. Agent: Barbara Zitwer, Barbara J. Zitwer Agency.
Starred review from April 1, 2022
Unfolding over decades, this tale of love and intolerance from Kirkus Prize finalist Roorbach (The Remedy for Love) is narrated by Cindra Zoeller, who grows up in a wealthy family near Boston but loves the great outdoors. Little does she know that her association with a Cuban boyfriend and his gang would send her into the wilderness at age 16 for her involvement in a violent crime. Now she's serving three years in a rural Montana reform camp for girls, while her less-privileged boyfriend does 20 years' hard time. It isn't long before Cindra lands in harsh solitary for telling the truth about the lascivious camp doctor. Her rescuer is her lover Lucky Turtle, an enigmatic loner who drives the camp's van; his knowledge of Crow wisdom and traditions keeps them alive when they flee the camp and go deeper into the wilderness to elude an exhaustive manhunt. Cindra relates their plight from the viewpoint of her current life in Boston, where she's living her former camp therapist, Walter, who controls her every move and blames her for her own troubles. Her one hope is her brilliant son Ricky, who helps Cindra devise a plan to reconnect with Lucky. VERDICT Just how Roorbach dovetails Cindra's two disparate lives gives her story intensity and shows the power of love from many sources. An engrossing novel with standout characters.--Donna Bettencourt
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from March 1, 2022
A teenage girl sent to reform school in deepest Montana meets the love of her life the day she arrives--the school's van driver. "The driver was my age, maybe a little older, slender, huge cowboy hat and cowboy boots and cowboy buckle. He wore a long black braid tied with rawhide and thicker rawhide bands around his wiry biceps....He smelled like some distant burning, I can hardly explain it, studied my eyes whenever I was required to cooperate, didn't put his hands on me, didn't ask any questions, didn't offer any greetings, not a word from his mouth." Look out: Roorbach has created the sexiest man seen in literature in a good long time. This is Lucky Turtle, who, as 16-year-old Cindra Zoeller is about to learn, just keeps getting better the more you know him; his wilderness survival skills--which will come seriously into play--verge on the supernatural. What's more, the very next time they're alone together, taking the camp laundry into town, he reveals that his clairvoyant aunt has foreseen that she will be his wife. Fans of Roorbach's work--most recently The Girl of the Lake (2017)--have been waiting five years for this book and will not be disappointed. Again, the man has cooked up a completely captivating world, just a touch more magical and interesting than the real one. This time, it's a place called Turtle Butte, where a disgraced television actress has turned her attention to reforming misguided female youth at a facility called Camp Challenge. It's a slowly unfolding, complicated, suspenseful plot; it's safe to say that Cindra will not be reformed. There's no lane-staying for White guy Roorbach: His teenage-girl narrator is flawless; Chinese, Haitian, and Native characters are beautifully done. (Many sensitivity readers are thanked in the acknowledgments.) Lucky Turtle has his woodland lore and Native rituals; Cindra has her copy of Hawaii, which they read aloud from every night: "Michener was strong medicine." An epic love story and love letter to the West. No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from February 15, 2022
Sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller had the misfortune to be present when her twenty-year-old boyfriend committed felonious assault, leaving another man grievously injured. Though Cindra called an ambulance, she was charged with criminal mischief and, as a minor, remanded to Camp Challenge, a reform school in Elk Creek, Montana. The founder and director, Dora Dryden Conover, is a mysterious former child star who seems to vacillate between kindliness and vindictiveness. Cindra is assigned to laundry detail and her life acquires a new trajectory when she meets the van driver, Lucky Turtle who she thinks might be Crow, but whose heritage is complicated. Lucky confesses to Cindra that his Aunt Maria had a vision that Cindra would become his wife and so begins the rest of their lives. Roorbach (The Girl of the Lake, 2017) is a consummate raconteur skilled in breathing life into his characters. His prose is well-suited to the Montana landscape, capacious yet created with poetic economy, evoking the splendor of nature in language that sparkles like crystal clear mountain water. Lucky and Cindra run off together, becoming fugitives and squatting in an abandoned cabin. Cindra learns to forage and garden, and Lucky teaches her to track and hunt. Roorbach's understated, luminescent novel beautifully evokes an idyllic world created when two hearts are braided together.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from September 1, 2022
Narrator Brittany Pressley's empathetic delivery adds more tenderness to this captivating coming-of-age story, the fifth novel from Kirkus Prize finalist Roorbach (The Remedy of Love). Cindra Zoeller lives in Boston with her beloved, brilliant son Ricky and her unpleasant partner Walter--an older man who had been her therapist. From this mostly stable vantage point, Cindra recalls her tumultuous teenage years. Present during a felonious assault at age 16, she was sentenced to Camp Challenge reform school in Montana. Though she loves the outdoors, Cindra finds the austere camp oppressive, until she gets to know Lucky, the school's inscrutable van driver, a handsome young man she believes to be Crow. When Lucky rescues Cindra from solitary confinement, they escape and live off the grid for a time, with the help of friends. As former city girl Cindra learns wildness survival skills, Pressley gives her a voice that waivers between excitement at this incredible adventure and longing for her father and the creature comforts of civilization. Pressley lingers over Roorbach's poetic descriptions of the spectacular landscape, making listeners feel as though they are sitting beside the characters under the vast Montana sky. VERDICT Perfect for anyone seeking a charming, well-told adventure.--Beth Farrell
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.