Second Half

To continue on with The Half Life...the story opens with this line..."Footsteps on the forest floor made a noise like paper crumpling in a child's fist...High above, the boughs of the fir trees shifted in the wind, revealing white fragments of twilight sky and the trunks made melancholy aisles into the gloom." I am a sucker for good beginnings and vivid nature ridden description. The suspense builds as a young man travels through the forest, convinced someone or something is following him, watching him, stalking him in the dense underbrush of an Oregon forest. It is the 1820's and his name fittingly is Cookie (he cooks for a group of trappers working for the Hudson's Bay Company). We follow two parallel narratives. The life and loves of Cookie in a world that is male from the West to the East, all the way from Oregon to China. The second narrative evolves around the discovery of two skeletons, hands entwined in a grave on a commune during the 1980's. Tina Plank a relatively well ajusted teenage girls (who most enjoys watching dust motes float across her line of vision while lying on her back across her bed) lives on this commune and forms a friendship with a lifecycle of it's own. This is a lovely poetic meandering read with equal measures of historical richness and mysterious intrigue. Words of caution...it stalls out a bit in the middle and I suggest skipping the movie script written by the teenage girls (I didn't read beyond the first few paragraphs, it goes on and on, I hate add-ons like this, school assignments and other "fake" kid/teen writing)...Other than that, I highly recommend it!