- Publisher : A Strange Object (March 14, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 300 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1646052293
- ISBN-13 : 978-1646052295
Recipient of a Montana Book Award Honor and shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's 2023 Debut Novel Prize, LOOKOUT is set in Rural Montana and centers on the dual coming-of-age of a girl and her father amid the natural and cultural forces that shape their family.
LOOKOUT tells the story of the Kinzlers, a complex working-class family firmly rooted in northwestern Montana.
Josiah and Margaret Kinzler have forged an unusual bond marked by both tenderness and distance; their daughters, Cody and Louisa, grow up watching their parents navigate what it means to be true to yourself and what that costs. LOOKOUT offers a gripping dual coming-of-age: Cody's from stoic ranch kid to hotshot firefighter to resilient woman learning to rely on others, and Josiah's as he struggles to thrive in a world that has misunderstood him. Bound by their love of the land, the Kinzlers work to bridge the gaps created by what they leave unspoken. LOOKOUT brings to life a family coming out to itself, at home in a new and nuanced American West.
Review
Lookout, and Christine, are worthy of compare to the greater Northwest's fiction-writing best. — David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House
"Lookout is an unforgettable novel, both stunning and subtle, written with nuance and compassion. This astonishing novel of work, love, community and forgiveness in 20th-century rural Montana will leave readers forever changed for the better."
--Shelf Awareness
The sense of community, family, and buried secrets at its heart is almost tactile in its presence. A deeply felt, unconventionally told family story." --Kirkus Reviews
LOOKOUT offers a stunning portrait of a family firmly rooted to the land in northwest Montana. Told through numerous points of view, in authentic voices, and with a poetic ear for language, this is the kind of novel one becomes a part of. --Big Sky Journal
"Lookout exudes a grounded know-how increasingly rare in American fiction. This novel overflows with genuine precision. Byl's grasp of complex livelihoods and distinctive voices exudes the authority of lived experience and creates a sense of community via sheer reading pleasure. This book gave me mysterious dreams. It let me relive the raising of my own two daughters. Its description of how to fell a hundred foot larch could enable a careful reader with modest chainsaw skills to drop such a tree safely. Most powerfully, Byl's portrayals of human beings communicating and miscommunicating, of things beautifully said and done and tragically left unsaid and undone, sometimes left me speechless, other times in tears tinged by grief and by joy. Finally, the woodshop she so meticulously portrays, the tools therein mastered, the unique furniture, shelves and woodworking art produced, and electrifying scenes that occur in that charmed yet haunted space, turned the shop itself, for me, into the novel's most unforgettable character. To read Byl is to marvel. This work exemplifies some of the greatest mysteries of the novel form: how keen attention to the particular can lead to an unsayable sense of the universal; how fidelity to the ordinary lets us glimpse the extraordinary; how wrong we can be ever to rush to judgments that exclude forgiveness. Lookout, and Christine, are worthy of compare to the greater Northwest's fiction-writing best.
— David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House
There's a great deal of love in this book — often complicated, always genuinely depicted, never with a hint of sentimentality. Readers will come away with full and aching hearts, the best thing that can be said about any novel. --Nancy Lord for Anchorage Daily News
About the Author
Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods (Beacon Press, 2013), a book about trail crews, tools, wildness, and labor; it was short-listed for the 2014 Willa Award in nonfiction. Her prose has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Sun, Crazyhorse, and Brevity, among other journals and anthologies. A grant recipient from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and winner of the Alaska Literary Award in 2015, Byl has been a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and writer-in-residence for Fishtrap’s Writer-in-the-Schools program. Christine has worked as a professional trail-builder for more than twenty-five years; she lives with her family in Interior Alaska on the homelands of the Dene.
