Customer Reviews:
 A beautifully captured portrait of Up North and of a young Hemingway May 24, 2008
Renowned Michigan author Gloria Whelan (Homeless Bird, Angel on the Square, Once on this Island) has imagined Ernest Hemingway's sixteenth summer in The Pathless Woods, a novel based on numerous biographical details of the real Ernest, including his family's summer cottage Windemere on Walloon Lake near Charlevoix.
Ernie is precariously perched between adolescence and adulthood, yearning for more independence and freedom from the strangulating closeness of his family's life in Oak Park, Illinois. In Oak Park, he's known as the promising high school sophomore who's a football player, boxer, cellist, debater, and member of the Glee Club, hiking club, and Christian Endeavor Society. Ernie, who writes for the school newspaper, has decided that he'd rather be a reporter than a doctor like his father. However, at Windemere, he simply becomes Ernie, a camper, fisherman, hunter, farmer, and lover of nature. Since the past summer, Ernie has set up camp in an isolated spot across the lake, yearning for space and a place to read and dream. Like his father, he's a good shot, but he's also hot-tempered and impulsive.
He models his imaginary exploits on novels such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer and imagines himself as a Native American brave, partly due to his infatuation with the beautiful Nina LaCoeur, a French-Canadian Indian. He also reads Teddie Roosevelt's African Game Trails and imagines himself on safari at his isolated camp in the woods. However, someone wants him gone. He returns to his camp on the first day to find that someone's destroyed his campsite.
The remainder of the novel addresses his relationship with his family, particularly with his younger sister Sunny, his attraction to Nina, and his quest to discover who is stalking him in the woods. His father, a doctor, has been forced to stay behind in Oak Park, leaving Ernie in charge of caring for the orchard and garden, giving him a taste of adult responsibility. Ernie's relationship with his parents leaves him confused; his mother, once an aspiring singer, shuns housework, leaving his father to do "women's work" such as canning and cleaning, which seems shameful and emasculating for young Ernie. His father holds high expectations for Ernie, demanding productivity and attention to detail. Ernie learns hard lessons about responsibility and relationships that influence his later writings.
Whelan based her characterization of Ernest on books written by Hemingway's siblings Leicester, Madelaine and Marcelline, as well as early articles written by Hemingway and stories that Hemingway himself penned about growing up on Walloon Lake, combined with her own experiences summering in Northern Michigan. The Pathless Woods is a beautifully written love song to Northern Michigan's wild, pathless woods, clear streams, and vanished wilderness, and Ernie's family life at their rustic cottage is like sipping lemonade on a porch rocking chair, watching the days of summer glide effortlessly by.
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