My eldest daughter saw this book on my bedside table and asked to take it home and read it. So she read Leif Enger’s newest novel before I even opened it. When she brought it back I asked her how it was, and she said, “Well, it’s good, but it’s rather dark.”

Dark indeed. I Cheerfully Refuse is the story of a man, Rainy, who becomes a fugitive, innocent of any crime, but pursued by a villainous lawman in a dystopian world that has traded law and order for despotism and chaos. It was unclear to me whether nuclear war or climate change or something else or a combination of things made the setting, in and around Lake Superior in Michigan and Canada, so degraded and oppressive. However, something happened to the country and then something else to Rainy in particular, and Rainy is caught in a hellish predicament, not of his own making. So he sets sail in a dilapidated old sailboat to escape the bad guys and find the good.

It is a doomed quest, but Rainy doesn’t give up. He meets with people and situations both good and evil in his journey. And (SPOILER ALERT), he does, after much suffering, win through to a semi-hopeful ending. There’s a bit of magical realism and some futuristic dystopian fantasy as the story winds through the islands and shores of Lake Superior. The plot, however, is not the best part of the book. It’s the words. Mr. Enger is a master at manipulating and communicating with words. He verbs a few of the nouns, and nouns some adjectives and verbs, and mixes up the syntax and casually drops in the metaphors and similes just enough to keep a reader on her toes, reading carefully and slowly, and going back to savor and make sure I didn’t miss something along the journey.

Enger in this book writes lovely sentences like these:

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”

“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

“. . . our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”

“[I]t began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.”

“One shelf became two. Then a wall. Then eight-foot rolling racks from a shut library in Hayward, Wisconsin. Maudie suggested changing the shop name to reflect its inventory. Bread and Books. Loaves and Lit. Pulp and Provender. Lark laughed off the idea. She said all of it was bread.”

So, I Cheerfully Refuse is a good book, but dark. In times of chaos and uncertainty and change, it might be good to read a book about man living through similar (but much worse) times. Or it might not. I enjoyed the book, but your mileage and ability to stay cheerful may vary.

“I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.”

• The Three Owls: Third Book by Anne Carroll Moore*
• Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive by Russ Ramsey*
• This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks Into Our Darkness by Sarah Clarkson*
• In the Days of Alfred the Great by Eva March Tappan*
• The Fishermen and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast by Kirk W. Johnson
• Beyond Mere Motherhood: Moms Are People Too by Cindy Rollins*
• Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
• Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk
• Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier
• The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix*
• Ghosted: An American Story by Nancy French
• Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea

I see that none of these nonfiction books is a biography, although a couple are memoirs and some are biographical, telling a part of the life of one or more persons. A couple of the books are rather controversial, but I found those to be readable and true to my own experience of life in these controversial and adversarial times. I recommend all of the above, but The Three Owls by New York City librarian Anne Carroll Moore was the most comforting and illuminating of the dozen books, taking me out of this time and place to a children’s literature culture of 100 years ago. If we can’t recapture or recreate those times and that culture, we can at least live in them for a little while by reading about the books of that era. The Three Owls: Third Book is a compilation of “contemporary criticism of children’s books, 1927-1930, written and edited by Anne Carroll Moore.” I would very much like to own books 1 and 2 as well.

Links are to reviews here at Semicolon or elsewhere. Starred books are available for library patrons to borrow from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

My children’s fiction reading this year has been influenced a lot by two projects: my project to read and evaluate current day middle grade fiction published in 2024 and my other project to read and evaluate the middle grade fiction of 60 years ago, published in 1964. I found more gold in ’64 than I did in 2024, but there were a few good ones from this past year. I also spent a lot of time with one particular children’s author from the past who deserved all of the awards he received. Links are to reviews of the books here at Semicolon or at Plumfield and Paideia.

• The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander (1964) (re-read)
• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (re-read)
• The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill (1964) (re-read)
• Ribsy by Beverly Cleary (1964) (re-read)
• Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge (1964)
• Carolina’s Courage by Elizabeth Yates (1964)
• The Nickel-Plated Beauty by Patricia Beatty (1964)
• The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong
• Along Came a Dog by Meindert DeJong
• Shadrach by Meindert DeJong
• Hurry Home, Candy by Meindert DeJong
• Journey From Peppermint Street by Meindert DeJong
• Ferris by Kate DiCamillo (2024)

Indeed, it was the year of good books from 1964, and the year of Meindert DeJong. If you’ve not read any of DeJong’s award-winning books, and if you like animal stories, you should definitely try one of Mr. DeJong’s heart-warming tales.