The Fruit of Stone

Rating:
Summary: Getting It Right
Review: Mark Spragg tells a good story populated with characters who make you want to know them -- to work with them and to drink cold beer with them after the work is done, as if they were about the most interesting friends you could ever hope to find. Spragg's characters are ranchers and stockmen and the wives and children of ranchers and stockmen, making their way through life in the high grasslands paradise of Wyoming. People, place, and the details of actual ranch life are braided into a hard-twist narrative with prose that can make you weep. Mark Spragg writes beautifully -- no other way to say it. The language seems to lope down the page, the horses and cattle to move in real sunlight hazed in the mist of their own rising dust. Page after page, it all just seems so exactly right.

Rating:
Summary: Heart's Desire
Review: Mark Spragg's Fruit of Stone is a book that wakes your senses and your heart. You can hear the meadowlarks, smell the scents of creek bed, leather, ranch and barn, taste the dust and steak and beer in his words; and you can feel your heart soften toward the unlikable Bennett and break at the solitary-ness of McEban's character. You understand McEban's generosity and his reticence through the people he came from. Grievous behavior, big country, wind, snow, storm, guns, broken bones, forgiveness, human longing and tenderness fill this book to the brim. I hope for more from the author - soon.