After reading (and loving) I Cheerfully Refuse, I chose this earlier Leif Enger book from 2018 where the story again takes place in a small Minnesota town on Lake Superior, not far from the Canadian border. Fictional Greenstone (according to the author, an amalgam of Silver Bay, Beaver Bay and Grand Marais – small towns along Lake Superior’s North Shore) is an old mining town with a shuttered taconite plant, vacant storefronts, a few cafes, one motel, a sheriff trying out his third career, a mayor with high hopes, and our main character, Virgil Wander, owner of the town theater called the Empress.

When we meet Virgil, he’s telling us about the moment he’d driven off snowy Highway 61, through the guardrail and into Lake Superior where his Pontiac sank 100 feet and where a local beachcomber who runs the salvage yard happened to be picking for junk along the shore and pulled the middle aged bachelor from his car. 

For the next several months, Virgil grasps for memory and language, and through his recovery, we meet these small town characters, the people Virgil has lived with for his twenty years in Greenstone, along with the newly arrive Rune, a kite flyer from Norway, who has come to Greenstone having just learned that he had a son, Alec, who once lived there. That son disappeared years ago (likely in a plane crash), but his wife and son still live in Greenstone. So Rune becomes Virgil’s roommate above the Empress (if left alone Virgils’ lack of memory leaves him unsafe) as well as grandfather to Bjorn, now a young man helping run the Empress.

In terms of plot, there’s not a lot to convey. It’s mostly beautiful writing about characters: some are quirky, one is creepy, one is a drunk, several have endured too much loss, and most are doing their best, whether that’s running a threadbare business, flying kites, fishing, designing business signs, projecting films, or planning the Hard Luck Days festival to celebrate this once thriving town. What we come away with is a sense of community too little seen these days in our own world. It sort of makes the reader want to move to a tiny Minnesota town living a hardscrabble life where people love and help each other.