Pale Morning Done
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Marshall is learning to love the land. He’s in the process of transforming his father’s ranch into prime spring creek fishing, literally molding the land as he attempts to fashion himself.He’s a guide, along with his two closest friends, Molly and Alton. All three are trying to step out of a youthful fascination with the freewheeling, fish-guiding life, and into a sustainable life on the land and water of Montana. Pale Morning Done is a coming-of place novel, in which Marshall must decide between the woman who wants him and the woman who loves him; between the future desired by his father and the future created by himself; between the truth that will bind and the omission that will free. It is about the tides that toss friends, sometimes against each other, and ultimately unites them against enemies. It is about the delicate balance of our lives that violence can abruptly topple.Beautifully written, this first novel scours the landscape of emotion as it revels in the physical landscape of Montana. Pale Morning Done is sure to place Jeff Hull in the company of other great chroniclers of the new West, including Norman McLean, William Kittredge, and Tom McGuane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Montana fly-fishing guide strives to restore his father's ranch to nature and its freshwater spring to a fishing stream while navigating a thorny romantic triangle in Hull's impressive first novel, which balances vivid, meticulous outdoor writing with fine characterization. The 33-year-old guide, Marshall Tate, faces an uphill battle to secure the water rights for the spring from the Klingmans, an ornery ranching clan that owns the adjoining land. While Tate clashes with the Klingman men, he also wrestles with his simultaneous attraction to Daisy Klingman, a childhood friend and longtime on-again, off-again lover, and Molly Huckabee, another fishing guide with whom his friendship blooms into something more. Hull engagingly captures the family feud, the nuances of fly-fishing and the dilemma of a typically indecisive and commitment-phobic young American male. Though the relationship subplot can be predictable, the novel stands out for its graceful, lovely evocation of the outdoors and as a chronicle of the struggle for control of a rare plot of Western wilderness.
