Is suicide a choice or a foregone conclusion? When Hattie rushes home to Canada, she is not exactly perturbed by the sight of her sister, who has been languishing in a sickly stew of depression. As Hattie acknowledges, Min's been traveling in two opposite directions at once, towards infancy and death since forever, and it is Hattie's job to pick up the pieces. After tenderly depositing her sister in the psych ward, Hattie surveys the scene at home featuring Thebes, the eccentric, purple-haired 11-year-old with a penchant for hyperbole and hip-hop vernacular, and Logan, the staunchly silent yet preternaturally wise teenage nephew. A fear of social workers sparks Hattie to pack the minivan and take her sister's kids west on an off-kilter road trip. Destination: their long-lost father. Misadventures, many very funny, plague the scarred but resilient Troutmans. Toews (A Complicated Kindness, 2004) excels here at comedic sophistication, all while masterfully embedding explorations of madness, truth, and the immense sorrow that comes from caring for someone who is derailed by mania's devious tug.--Cook, Emily Copyright 2008 Booklist

Emulating the comedic stylings of indie hits like Little Miss Sunshine provides a wealth of material and a breath of fresh air for Canadian novelist Toews (A Boy of Good Breeding, 2006, etc). "Yeah, so things have fallen apart," declares reluctant narrator Hattie Troutman, summarizing her situation with a postmodern echo of Yeats' famous lament. Yanked from her Parisian fantasy life as an expatriate living with her leech of a boyfriend, prodigal sibling Hattie rushes home to Manitoba when her sister Min is hospitalized with another catatonic bout, symptomatic of a lifelong mental illness. Hattie is marooned with Min's 11-year-old daughter Thebes, a goofy smart aleck with a predilection for busting into gangsta rap, and 15-year-old son Logan, a moody renegade who channels his aggression into basketball. Absent of maternal instincts, Hattie decides the best course of action is a road trip to find the kids' long-absent father, Doug Cherkis. Commandeering a beat-up van, the trio travels through the alien landscapes of Cheyenne, Moab and Twentynine Palms in search of the anarchic artist who reportedly spawned the lesser Troutmans. Life on the road doesn't increase Hattie's affection toward her charges. "I thought: Strangle the children, dump their bodies in the ditch," she notes early in her voyage. With barbed wit, Toews plunders some of the emotional themes from her earlier work, among them absent fathers, the trials of adolescence and the tribulations of single motherhood. The story feels suspiciously directionless much of the time. Fortunately, the snappy personalities of Hattie's charges and the odd collection of ramblers, Jesus freaks and vagabonds they encounter make for entertaining interludes between the deliciously uncomfortable silences of the book's primary characters. Smarter and more thoughtful than its cinematic inspirations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Troutman world is falling apart--again. Mentally ill Min is bed-ridden and suffering from paranoid delusions; her 15-year-old son, Logan, is in trouble at school; and her 11-year-old daughter, Thebes, is trying and failing to hold it all together. Enter a reluctant and clueless Aunt Hattie, recently dumped by her boyfriend in the City of Light, and the stage is set for this latest book by Toews (Boy of Good Breeding). After the suicidal Min is carried to the hospital, Hattie decides to take the kids on a road trip across the Canadian border into America to find the children's AWOL father. The odyssey is laced with moments of grief and dotted with the quirky places, people, and incidents one might expect to find on a circuitous journey through the hinterlands of the vast American West. Ultimately, the long road leads to the beginning of healing and the faith and strength to keep carrying on. Engaging, humorous, grim, and redemptive, this is essential reading; recommended for public libraries.--Jyna Scheeren, Troy P.L., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

SOMEHOW, despite high gas prices, creeping traffic and exasperating construction delays, the road that presumably goes on forever has remained a reliable source of freedom dreams, pop songs and plot-lite fiction. In Miriam Toews's fourth novel, "The Flying Troutmans," a family of damaged, misfit Manitobans pile into a Ford Aerostar and take a meandering trip across the Western United States - South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California - and on down to the Mexican border, a journey of a few thousand miles that ends up seeming like several million. I blame the disagreeable company and the vapid conversation. Hattie Troutman, Toews's narrator, is a Canadian expat living in Paris and "pretending to be an artist" while missing (yet not really pining for) her "moody, adjective-hating" ex-boyfriend. Late one night, she receives a collect distress call. Her older sister, Min, has suffered another psychotic breakdown. Despite the fact that it was Min's chronic misery and sororicidal tendencies that sent Hattie fleeing to Europe, she flies home to arrange for her sister's hospitalization and take care of - or more precisely, Hattie being a markedly immature 28-year-old, hang out with - her neglected and emotionally injured niece and nephew. Thebes, 11, is an unhygienic (no baths, ever) purple-haired motor mouth covered in fake tattoos; she's also an incipient cutter who regrets being born. Logan, 15 and "all jacked up on rebellion," wears headphones and face-hiding black hoodies, and is, for no apparent reason (perhaps because he likes short Q.&A. interviews?), romantically smitten with Deborah Solomon, the New York Times Magazine columnist. Not long after Hattie's arrival, he's also expelled from high school. Recalling her own grisly childhood (the time Min tried to drown her in Acapulco, the time Min locked her out of the house in subzero temperatures), Hattie at first seems to be struggling to dig deeply enough into her sister's grievances and instability to understand what it is that whips her into the frightening tirades that almost always end in stupor and despair. But that all turns out to be just solipsistic melancholy. Overwhelmed by the situations both at Min's house (where Thebes and Logan quarrel and sulk, isolate themselves and bounce off the walls) and at the hospital (where Min begs her sister to help her die), Hattie impulsively gases up the family van and drives the kids down into the States to search for their father, a long-gone gentle goofball whose last known whereabouts was "an art gallery in the middle of a field somewhere outside Murdo, S.D." They hit a deer, pick up a hitchhiker, adopt a pit bull. Logan carves his complaints into the minivan's dashboard with a penknife. He breaks his wrist. Thebes looks up words in the dictionary that she carries around, recites definitions and etymologies. She makes giant novelty checks with cardboard, scissors and crayons. Again and again Hattie calls the hospital from the strangely plentiful public telephones she finds along the highway and is repeatedly told that Min is unavailable. This happens, then this happens, then this, but nothing that happens ever complicates the journey in any major or unexpected way, or creates serious obstacles. Thebes and Logan's father, it turns out, left South Dakota years ago, but no problem - a former neighbor conveniently remembers that he moved to Twentynine Palms, Calif. Later, his helpful ex-girlfriend directs the travelers to their ultimate destination: a town farther south where he has joined a group of anarchists "keeping track of and documenting the actions and injustices of the U.S. Border Patrol." For some reason or another. Improbable characters flash in and flash out, signifying nothing: the waitress in Kingman, Ariz., who mesmerizes the Troutmans with the sad tale of her teenage abortion and scarred Fallopian tubes; the casserole-baking neo-hippie in Flagstaff who was fired from his job at a religious radio station after "translating Cheech and Chong dialogues into Spanish and airing them late at night"; the loutish "family of haters" at a rodeo and carnival in Cheyenne who warn Thebes "to sit down and stay down, they'd paid their money to see the bronco bustin' and dang if they were gonna have some wild foreign retard leapin' up every second and blockin' their view." Dang? Caricatures are bad enough, but most of the ones drawn here seem to be out of date by 40 or 50 years. And speaking of being out of date, when was the last time an 11-year-old girl could walk into a grocery store in Utah, as Thebes does, and buy a bottle of wine? The vernacular narrative, which had spark, specificity and rueful wit throughout the novel's opening chapters, becomes sloppy and gabbling, like a blog hastily banged out. Pop culture references, an indiscriminate barrage of them, too often substitute for clear exposition ("Thebes had taken all her filthy, sweaty hair and sculpted it upwards like a Smurf's and stuck a Sharpie through it Pebbles Flintstone-style and even from a distance I could hear her say, Bro, what's a Lynyrd Skynyrd?"). Hattie's observations, her endless asides, turn petty, strained and trite: "I remembered that this was the United States and all that would happen was that we'd get our faces blown off and die instantly." Toews's penchant for summarized dialogue becomes tedious and distancing, turning scenes into virtual digests, and her inability, or unwillingness, to describe or contextualize - or even to gaze long upon - the passing countryside, is a real handicap when you're writing a road novel. "I drove through the park as fast as I could, which was excruciatingly slowly because the road was narrow and curvy and park rangers were all over the place. It was all desert and sky and scrubby bushes and some oddly shaped trees." And that's it for the spectacular Joshua Tree National Park. By the time she delivers her semi-wild charges to a preposterously happy reunion with their dad (and who knew it could be so darn easy to find someone in the desert! - all you have to do is keep going till you come upon "a group of people sitting around cooking something on a camp stove" and there he'll be, just waiting), Hattie Troutman has had her long anticipated, if completely unearned, life-changing epiphany. "I had a new career. I had a mission. I'd become a cartographer of the uncharted world of Min" - despite the fact that she left Min lying zonked out on a battery of meds in a scary hospital to go barreling across the United States - "and I'd raise her from the dead, like a baby, sort of." (I don't know what that means, either.) "When she was well enough to take control, she could throw me out, plot her own course, and I wouldn't stand in her way. And I wouldn't help her to die." Sounds uplifting, except from the start we've known that Hattie would never help her sister die. There was never any question about it. Finally, nothing about "The Flying Troutmans" feels authentic, not the characters and not their psychology, and certainly not the American landscape they blast through, leaving dust in the slipstream, but very little else. A family of damaged, misfit Manitobans takes a meandering trip across the Western United States. Tom De Haven teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of the Derby Dugan trilogy of novels.

A road novel helped along by a lovably nutty cast, Toews's latest (after A Complicated Kindness) follows a ragtag crew as they crisscross America. Hattie, recently dumped in Paris by her moody, adjective-hating boyfriend, returns home to Canada after receiving an emergency phone call from her niece. Turns out, Hattie's sister, Min, is back in the psych ward, and her kids, 11-year-old Thebes and 15-year-old Logan, are fending for themselves. Thus the quirky trio--purple-haired, wise-beyond-her-years Thebes, recently expelled brother Logan and overwhelmed Hattie--embark on a road trip to the States to find the kids' long-missing father. What follows is a Little Miss Sunshine-like quest in which the characters learn about themselves and each other as they weather car repairs, sleazy motel rooms and encounters with bizarre people. Toews's gift for writing precocious children and the story's antic momentum redeem the familiar set-up, and if the ending feels a bit rushed, it's largely because it's tough to let Toews's characters go. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.