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If Not For This Paperback – August 5, 2014
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“If Not For This is a terrific novel, poignant as hell, but feisty, funny, and romantic, too. Pete Fromm is a powerful, lucid writer, a perfect guide to the unpredictable rivers and people of the interior West, to their deep channels and breathtaking turns.”
—Jess Walter
“Here, brave and unabashed, is a novel about love, two sweet droll people who become a family, and then—brave and unabashed—real trouble magnifies everything. In If Not For This, Pete Fromm brings us a rich, deeply felt book, so full of kindness and kind people that it’s an absolute phenomenon.”
—Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine
“What do you do when you get everything you most desire in this life, but getting through every day requires you to be a superhero? In Pete Fromm’s smart, gorgeous, uplifting and heartbreaking new novel, If Not For This, you consider yourself damn lucky.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell
—Jess Walter
“Here, brave and unabashed, is a novel about love, two sweet droll people who become a family, and then—brave and unabashed—real trouble magnifies everything. In If Not For This, Pete Fromm brings us a rich, deeply felt book, so full of kindness and kind people that it’s an absolute phenomenon.”
—Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine
“What do you do when you get everything you most desire in this life, but getting through every day requires you to be a superhero? In Pete Fromm’s smart, gorgeous, uplifting and heartbreaking new novel, If Not For This, you consider yourself damn lucky.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell
About the Author
Pete Fromm is a four-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Literary Award for the novels As Cool As I Am and How All This Started, a story collection, Dry Rain, and a memoir, Indian Creek Chronicles. His new novel is If Not For This. The film version of As Cool As I Am, starring Claire Danes, James Marsden, and Sarah Bolger, was released in June of 2013. He is the author of four other short story collections and has published over two hundred stories in magazines. A core faculty member at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program, he has a degree in wildlife biology from the University of Montana and worked for years as a river ranger in Grand Teton National Park. He lives with his family in Montana, where he can often be seen walking underneath his canoe to the river.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By
Heidi Willis
on August 5, 2014
I first read this book soon after a friend of mine was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which seemed ironic since I first read Fromm’s novel How All This Started after another friend was diagnosed as bipolar. While it would be easy to say there is something deeply personal about reading a book that hits so close to home, it is never the plot that gets me in Pete’s stories; it’s the characters who feel real enough I believe they are not words but flesh and bone.
Maddy is a fiercely independent, stubborn, often humorously sarcastic woman with simple but large dreams of living off the rivers in the Wyoming Tetons. When she meets Dalton, the chemistry is so taut you could hang their discarded clothes off it. When Maddy is diagnosed with MS, though, every ambition and expectation – of family, kids, career–comes under attack.
If Not for This spans the lives of these two people who are so deeply in love. While it might easily have become an epistle of what MS can do to a body, it's really about how Maddy and Dalt’s love overcomes the ravages of a disease that costs them hopes and dreams and their future. It's not a romance, but it's one of the most powerful love stories I've ever read.
I love Maddy. There are few characters in books I feel I really know, and she is one of them. It is impossible for me to believe she is just a name in a novel and not someone I’ve met, spent hours with, laughed and cried with and known in a personal way. There are times I wanted to yell at her, times I wanted to hug her, and times I wanted to learn from her.Read more ›
Maddy is a fiercely independent, stubborn, often humorously sarcastic woman with simple but large dreams of living off the rivers in the Wyoming Tetons. When she meets Dalton, the chemistry is so taut you could hang their discarded clothes off it. When Maddy is diagnosed with MS, though, every ambition and expectation – of family, kids, career–comes under attack.
If Not for This spans the lives of these two people who are so deeply in love. While it might easily have become an epistle of what MS can do to a body, it's really about how Maddy and Dalt’s love overcomes the ravages of a disease that costs them hopes and dreams and their future. It's not a romance, but it's one of the most powerful love stories I've ever read.
I love Maddy. There are few characters in books I feel I really know, and she is one of them. It is impossible for me to believe she is just a name in a novel and not someone I’ve met, spent hours with, laughed and cried with and known in a personal way. There are times I wanted to yell at her, times I wanted to hug her, and times I wanted to learn from her.Read more ›
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By
Charles M. Nobles
VINE VOICE on August 13, 2014
This is absolutely one of the best books I have read in a very long time.
I have read other Fromm works and found them well worth the time but this one is just so far above the rest.
The book is so wonderfully written and the poignant parts are so understated yet so much a part of the book. Maddy and Dalt begin a trip on the river and end up with a wonderful story you will be so happy to have taken the time to read it. It is poignant, funny, romantic, and a great guide into the daily lives of folks just like you and I but with some unforeseen problems that will make you happy and sometimes sad but always wanting to turn the page.
I don't intend to give you much of the plot but believe me you will be so in love with the ending you will never forget the time it takes to read it. This is a great read from a person that has mastered the art. You will love it.
I have read other Fromm works and found them well worth the time but this one is just so far above the rest.
The book is so wonderfully written and the poignant parts are so understated yet so much a part of the book. Maddy and Dalt begin a trip on the river and end up with a wonderful story you will be so happy to have taken the time to read it. It is poignant, funny, romantic, and a great guide into the daily lives of folks just like you and I but with some unforeseen problems that will make you happy and sometimes sad but always wanting to turn the page.
I don't intend to give you much of the plot but believe me you will be so in love with the ending you will never forget the time it takes to read it. This is a great read from a person that has mastered the art. You will love it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By
Kris Dinnison
on September 14, 2014
Last night I finished Pete Fromm's new novel "If Not For This". Woke up thinking about it this morning. It's one of those books that feels so true, like he's tapped in to these universal feelings about family and marriage and change and things we sign up for and things we don't sign up for and made the novel's specifics stand in for all that without me even noticing until the end. Yes, the main character has M.S., but this is not a book about M.S. It's a book about people who face the world with bold, broken, courageous hearts. Beautiful and funny and just what I needed right now.
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