Mostly Water

In Mostly Water, essays form a linked memoir that explores the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In these landscapes, human dwellers are entwined in histories as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu "half potlatch and half potluck." Events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea in these stories—but so do music and love and hope in the precious otherness of nature.