Deirdre McNamer's RED ROVER is something of a puzzle, but in a good way. Its diverse characters and its time jumps from 1920s Montana to the post-war 1940s and then all the way to present day force you to pay attention, so you can put the various pieces of the story together. Like the jigsaw puzzles that are depicted as popular with the patients of the Missoula rehabilitation center/nursing home where some of the characters end up - and where lives which once touched only tangentially finally intersect, perhaps for the last time.

The story is of two brothers, Neil and Aidan Tierney; one becomes a B-29 pilot flying out of Saipan over Japan, the other an FBI agent sent undercover to Argentina, supposedly to ferret out Nazis. A third man, Roland Taliaferro, who has escaped a hard life in the Butte copper mines to attend college and law school, figures prominently in their lives and stories as a 'good friend' of Aidan, who follows him into the FBI just before the war. Other characters are Opal Mix, an eccentric rural nurse who becomes a town coroner, and Wendell Whitcomb, fatherless and rudderless, who straightens himself out and becomes a newspaper reporter. McNamer skillfully weaves all of these disparate characters into a web of intrigue, betrayals and ruined lives, but she makes you work. She makes you think about how lives really do come together, drift or ricochet apart, and then converge again - all over a period of several eventful decades.

I was riveted by this complex tale. McNamer is an outstanding storyteller. Add her to the growing list of great writers coming out of the modern American West. Highly recommended. ( )

First, no, RED ROVER is not a book about a dog. Deidre McNamer could have chosen a better title for this very moving story.

And whoever chose the cover (or dust jacket) should have picked something less misleading. If they had, I probably would have read this 2007 book sooner. But this picture gives a false impression; RED ROVER begins with two boys riding horses, but it soon moves forward in time and to other Montana locations.

RED ROVER is a mystery. After Aidan Tierney goes to college and law school, he joins the FBI and requests hazardous duty. He is sent as a secret agent to Argentina and returns to the U.S. a very, very sick man. Soon he is dead.

The mystery of RED ROVER is how and why Aidan died, and who is responsible. Was it suicide, an accident, or murder?

So RED ROVER looks at characters who played parts in Aidan’s life. We see some characters beginning when they were children and study characters’ lives before, during, and after World War II. We see events from more than one perspective as the parts of the book take us back and forth in time, right up to 2003 when most characters are in their 80s and 90s.

RED ROVER is a short book, 264 pages. It covers so much time and so many character studies, this could easily be a monstrosity. Many, maybe most, authors would have included details and whole paragraphs that would bore most readers. But RED ROVER’s descriptions and character studies are tight, with no wasted words. So what could have been tedious is, instead, engrossing.

It is also interesting to note that McNamer felt she had to write this . It is based on the story of her uncle, originally meant to be nonfiction. ( )

excellent read ( )

Based on reviews and description of the story, I thought I would like this book, but I was very disappointed. It was not compelling and the plot was marginal and certainly not very interesting. The author goes into great details trying to be artsy with descriptions of inane things, but I did not find the characters interesting. The book is somewhat depressing and gives the reader the impression that Montana is somewhat of a wasteland of people who make mountains out of molehills. ( )

I really expected to like this novel a lot. I'll go a step farther and say that I really wanted to like this novel - and that's probably why I'm a little disappointed in it. According to the New York Times, Red Rover is a very personal novel to its author, Deirdre McNamer, a story that she at first intended to tell as nonfiction but decided to flesh out as fiction in order to "to create a larger narrative context." It is a story about her uncle, a former FBI agent during World War II who suffered a mysterious death after the war. The local coroner gave conflicting opinions about the death and McNamer's family never really accepted the official verdict that the death was most likely to have been the result of a tragic accident.

Red Rover focuses on brothers Aiden and Neil Tierney, two young men who grew up in Montana in the 1920s, a time when it was not all that unusual that young boys would be allowed to explore the Montana prairies alone on horseback for days at a time. The Tierney boys never lost their love of adventure, and after Pearl Harbor each of them took a role in the defense of his country. Both men survived the war and returned to Montana after their service, Aiden as an FBI agent assigned to do dangerous undercover work in Argentina and Neil, as a pilot who flew B-29 missions in the Pacific.

Neil, the younger of the two, soon established a new life for himself in post-war Montana but Aiden, who returned an embittered man, appeared to be slowly dying of some mysterious disease that he brought home with him from Argentina. When Aiden threatened to go public with his grievances against the FBI, the agency sent an old friend, and fellow agent, Roland Taliaferro, to talk some sense into him. Roland's efforts to calm his friend down ended suddenly when Aiden was found dead, the victim of what appears to be either a self-inflicted shotgun blast or of some terrible accident. Neil Tierney refuses to accept either possibility and remains convinced that his brother has been eliminated at the orders of someone within the FBI. But, of course, life goes on, and it is only a chance meeting between Taliaferro and Neil in a rehabilitation center some six decades later that finally reveals the truth about Aiden's death.

Red Rover, a grim story filled with flawed characters, is told through flashbacks to 1927, 1939 and 1946, and flashes forward to 2003. The plot is, at times, difficult to follow and loses some continuity as new characters move in and out of the specific periods of time in which the story is told. But despite being presented in a dry manner, and with so many breaks in time that its choppiness distracts from the story its author wants to tell, Red Rover paints a clear picture of life in Montana during the first half of the twentieth century and is worth a look.

Rated at: 3.0 ( )