When you read the work of Joe Wilkins, be it his poetry or prose, it\u2019s easy to get lulled into his vivid renderings of landscape, as with this line from his latest novel: \u201cOff to the west, rags and tracers of deep orange and vermillion were snagged in the broken teeth of the Bull Mountains. A little higher, the whole sky was rose laced with lavender.\u201d However picturesque and commanding the descriptions, Wilkins, an award-winning novelist, memoirist, and poet, doesn\u2019t allow the story to settle on breathtaking sunsets. No matter the beauty, the landscape holds heartache and hard work, grief and loneliness, and, in the case of \u201cThe Entire Sky,\u201d a chance for redemption. Early in the novel\u2019s opening pages, after the description of the sunset, he plants readers in the reality of rural eastern Montana: \u201cDelphia wasn\u2019t much more than a four-by-five grid of gravel streets, so it didn\u2019t matter where in town you were, you were always close to the edge.\u201d Just how close to the edge is the novel\u2019s lyrical and visceral question. \u201cThe Entire Sky\u201d won the 2024 Montana Book Award and was longlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Set in the spring of 1994, \u201cThe Entire Sky\u201d tells the poignant story of a teenage boy on the run, an aging rancher who\u2019s grieving the death of his wife, and his daughter who returns home only to realize she\u2019s questioning everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Long abandoned by his mother and then sent to live with his uncle near the Absaroka-Beartooths, Justin looks a lot like the musician Kurt Cobain, whose rise to fame is even starting to make it on the airwaves in the sheep ranching terrain of Montana\u2019s Bull Mountains. When the novel opens, Justin is hitchhiking with his guitar, hoping to return to Seattle, and hoping no one will recognize him after he flees from his uncle\u2019s camper. Meanwhile, lambing season has arrived, and Rene Bouchard has left his little home in Delphia for the ranch at Willow Creek; but it\u2019s not as simple as tending to the herd. His wife has recently died and he\u2019s no longer sure that he wants to remain among the living. Like many kids who grew up in the sleepy railroad town of Delphia, Lianne, Rene\u2019s oldest daughter, had two choices: stay or go. Lianne left to attend college, then stayed away to teach writing in Spokane. She\u2019s now returned to this close-to-the-edge place to nurse her dying mother but feels compelled to stay and look after her dad, even if her husband and kids want her back in Spokane.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wilkins, who grew up on a sheep ranch in the Bull Mountains and now lives in the foothills of the Coast Range in Oregon, structures the powerful novel in alternating chapters, carrying us through Justin\u2019s flight and Rene\u2019s grief. When Justin shows up at Willow Creek, Rene sees more than a kid on the run. Justin reminds him of one of his sons, who was also pushed to the edge. Rene could use help with lambing. While the story pulls forward during this fateful spring, Wilkins also reverses course in the \u201cBefore\u201d sections, delving into the separate pasts of Justin, Rene and Lianne, illuminating how they all came to arrive in this moment where the promise and precariousness of spring is as evocative as the landscape. \u201cBefore\u201d is also the place where tender and closely held secrets unfold.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Entire Sky\u201d is a tense novel and yet it brims with heart. In Wilkins\u2019 masterful prose, words and characters collide and reunite with a texture and tenderness that only a writer of his caliber can pull off. He offers a novel that confronts violence and dangerous constructs of masculinity with sensitivity and compassion. There are so many forces at work pushing Justin, Rene and Lianne to the edge but once their lives join during the season of birth, the edge begins to lose its sharpness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wilkins writes, \u201cThe story of the ranch was the story of her father and her mother, and so it was her story as well. It had the force of a river at melt, of a storm at its blackest, and though she\u2019d heard it near on a hundred times, Lianne felt every telling ripple in her blood and bones.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll feel this novel in your blood and bones, too. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you read the work of Joe Wilkins, be it his poetry or prose, it\u2019s easy to get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-68534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}