Fall Back Down When I Die

March 25, 2019
Montana’s rugged beauty is poetically evoked in Wilkins’s fine debut. The story is divided into three narratives. First, readers meet Wendell Newman, a high school basketball star turned rancher whose family operation is in financial trouble after paying for his late mother’s failed surgeries. Things become even more complicated when he is asked to become guardian for his possibly mute, seven-year-old cousin, Rowdy Burns, whose mother has just been arrested for possession of methamphetamines. Next, there is Gillian Houlton, an assistant principal who is having a difficult time raising her teenage daughter, Maddy, after the death of her husband, a game warden who was killed by a rancher. Finally, readers get the written apologia of a man named Verl, who is on the run from the law and hiding out in the mountains. The three stories converge when a militia group, the Bull Mountain Resistance, shows up at Wendell’s door just as a deputy sheriff and social worker arrive to check up on Rowdy. Shots are fired, and Wendell is forced to flee into the mountains with Rowdy and Maddy. Though the plot depends on too many coincidences, the novel achieves an undeniable cumulative emotional power as the fates of its memorable characters play out. This is an accomplished first novel, notable in particular for its strong depiction of the timeless landscape of Montana’s big sky country.

Starred review from April 1, 2019
When Wendell Newman was a boy, his father shot and killed a game warden before disappearing for good into Montana's Bull Mountains, becoming in the process a martyr to the local anti-government militia?a group the adult Wendell wants nothing to do with. Now a poor but hardworking ranch hand, he is thrust into a parental role when a social worker drops off his jailed sister's nonspeaking son, Rowdy. The boy draws the attention of Gillian Houlton, assistant principal of the local school and the still-grieving wife of the dead warden; when Gillian's daughter Maddy takes an interest in both Wendell and Rowdy, unaware of Wendell's relationship to her father's killer, it's the final link in a deadly chain that inexorably tightens around all of them. In his first novel, short story writer, poet, and memoirist Wilkins (The Mountain and the Fathers, 2013) writes of hardscrabble life on the northern Great Plains with mesmerizing power, creating characters with rich if troubled interior lives who are desperate for agency and haunted by absent fathers. Wendell and Rowdy's slowly blossoming relationship is as lovely and breathtaking as the book's tragic ending is inevitable and devastating. Suffused with a sense of longing, loss, and the desire for change?asking deep questions about our place in the landscape and what, if anything, we are owed?this is a remarkable and unforgettable first novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)