Really a collection of short stories tied together with setting and one character who keeps reappearing (rather like Olive Kitteridge book). This is a man's book about men hunting, fishing, fathers and sons, life-long friends, male relationships (or lack of). The prose is great and the descriptions of the wilderness are beautiful. Most of the settings are in the north woods of Michigan's upper peninsula. Two stories center on fathers and sons. One a cocky young man whose father is fed up with him until he is almost killed; the other about an older son who is fed up with his father's ramblings on about his dead wife. All the stories are believable and touch on true emotions and the complexity of male relationships - the inability to speak their minds, the violence, the pride.

Not my favorite book, but one that I acknowledge as really good writing. ( )

Hunter’s Moon is a collection of short stories centered on an Upper Peninsula community that is oriented toward hunting and fishing tourism. Characters from one story show up in another, tying them together in a a novelistic anthology. The first story, “Blockers,” has three middle-aged men coming together to go game bird hunting, keeping their high school friendship alive, but the high school golden boy is drinking too much and his wife have tasked the others to keep an eye on him and sneak some Zoloft in his orange juice. “Grief” has a father and son on a hunting trip. Their relationship is difficult, at best, and the father is distracted by grief at the loss of his wife.

In “Dreamers” a hunting guide named Will confronts a returned soldier with PTSD leading to a manhunt for a killer. In the “Nature of Love on the Last Frontier”, father and son go hunting for Dall Sheep in Alaska. The son is reckless and rude and the father hopes they can bridge their divide. “Lost” takes us back to Will now dealing with the repercussions of his confrontation, he becomes erratic and angry and insults a friend. When he decides to apologize, he gets lost in the woods. “The Guest” is the first one that centers on a woman, the widow of one of the earlier characters, who opens a B&B and loves it. She has a passionate affair, an episodic one that recurs ever year when he comes for the hunting season. The final story, “Lines of Departure” a writer goes with Will to a retreat. They are going as mentors to vets with PTSD.

I loved Hunter’s Moon. I think my brother would love it but he only reads newspapers and nonfiction. It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite books of all time, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. In fact, Caputo proffers a similar lesson. In fact, consider this from Caputo, “I sensed that Will felt he had heard a true war story—no heroics, no excitement, and no redemption.” Now here is Tim O’Brien, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.”

I loved these stories. I thought “The Guest” was a weaker story than the others even though it carries the stories forward and expands our sense of the community. I guess it was that Lisa’s interests were so much smaller than the men in their stories, though I did appreciate her decision at the end and her sense of independence.

I love short stories. When the anthology comes together, weaving people together in story after story it’s even better.

I received an e-galley of Hunter’s Moon from the publisher through NetGalley.

Hunter’s Moon at Henry Holt and Co. | Macmillan
Phil Caputo author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/07/9781627794763/ ( )

A Philip Caputo novel can always be counted on as an opportunity to get deeply inside the heads of some interesting fictional characters, a chance to remind ourselves about what makes people in the real world - including ourselves - tick. Even though some readers may still want to quibble over whether or not Hunter’s Moon is a novel or a collection of short stories despite the fact that the book explicitly labels itself "a novel in stories," there is definitely plenty to learn about human nature in Caputo's latest.

All but one of the book’s seven interconnected, chronologically-ordered stories are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the exception being the one that takes place in a remote part of Alaska. Oddly enough, placing one of the stories in the wilds of Alaska makes clear just how remote and wild the Upper Peninsula itself is, and why so many of the damaged souls in Caputo’s stories find some kind of comfort there. Caputo describes northern Michigan so well that the Upper Peninsula in a way becomes the character that binds his stories together; it is the one constant between six of them and a first cousin to the Alaskan setting of the seventh.

These are stories about men and women who are not quite managing to live the lives they had expected for themselves, and their disappointment shows. They include stories about a man struggling to keep a second marriage alive despite his personal demons; a father who really, really dislikes his young adult son; a son who equally dislikes his 85-year-old father with whom he can’t remember ever getting along; and others about people trying to cope with a shared act of sudden violence that forever changed their lives for the worst.

This being a Philip Caputo book, many of its central characters are veterans of America’s recent wars, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and what they experienced in those wars is something they still think about every day of their lives. This is particularly true of the poignant story that closes the book, one in which a young veteran struggles to cope with the guilt that he brought home from the war with him, but it is a theme that occurs in several of the other stories. Even the collection's most prominent character is largely defined by what he experienced in Vietnam decades earlier.

Hunter’s Moon is vintage Philip Caputo; his fans and longtime readers will not be disappointed. ( )