Staff Pick
A particularly wrenching coming-of-age story, Gifted is set in rural western Oregon. The gorgeous forested land between Eugene and the coast is definitely a character here. Henry, a 15-year-old loner, has an inborn gift onto which he holds tenuously: he communes with nature, both flora and fauna.
His mother has already died when the novel starts, and his relationship with his father is uneasy and complicated. An act of violence sets Henry upon a course from which he cannot escape; a natural disaster soon follows, and Henry's life is ripped apart. Beginning a long, slow slog toward healing, Henry calls on his friends, his intellect, his gift, and his love of writing to help him.
Daniel does a fantastic job of both enlightening and (temporarily) blinding his reader. Touching on themes of eco-terrorism, natural disasters, family (both blood and not), teenage delinquency, coming-of-age, and first loves (and losses), Gifted is a beautifully written book with lyrical prose, deeply felt emotions, and close-up — but also bird's-eye — views of the lush landscapes of both the actual terrain and the human heart. Truly lovely. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades. He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows. His mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. An older couple, retiring to the area from California, offer solace and expanded cultural horizons but set him further at odds with his millworker father. The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each other, and Henry sets out on a trek through the backcountry of the Oregon Coast Range, seeking to understand what has happened and to forge a new sense of self.
A Huck Finn of the modern age, Henry is portrayed with a directness and clarity that pulls readers through the environmental dynamics of the Pacific Northwest. In stark yet beautiful prose that highlights his long tenure as a nature writer, Daniel creates an odyssey that explores the spiritual dimensions and deeply entangled pains and pleasures of belonging to the human domain and the natural world of which it is part.
Set in the mid-1990s, when environmentalists and timber communities warred over the future of the last Northwestern old-growth forests, Gifted is the story of a young man with a metaphysical imagination — naïve yet wise, gifted yet ordinary — who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, of his human relationships, and of the emerging complexities of his own being.
Review
"Part Catcher in the Rye, part Sometimes a Great Notion, John Daniel’s novel vividly evokes the emotional tempest of youth, the cultures and subcultures of the Pacific Northwest, and the rainwashed, animal-rich forests of Oregon’s Coast Range." Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
Review
"With Gifted, John Daniel has given us a lyrical, soaring tale that is deeply affecting. It’s full of love and pain and understanding and forgiveness... as is life, if we’re as lucky as our hero-guide, Henry Fielder. Daniel has written a transformative novel I will never forget." Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain and A Sudden Light
Review
"The gifts that relieve the guilt and losses suffered by John Daniel’s teenage hero come from the living matrix we call nature — rivers and mountains, lion and coyote and bear, stars and storms and throngs of birds — and from human guides — foster parents, a wise elder, a backwoods sage, two lovers, and a sympathetic judge. All of these redemptive figures, human and greater-than-human, are vividly rendered by a writer whose feeling for language and landscape shines from every page" Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works and Dancing in Dreamtime
Review
"Daniel captures Henry’s feeling of isolation and loneliness with eloquent prose that draws readers into the mossy old-growth forests of the Northwest. His clean descriptions and comforting digressions about the landscape mirror Henry’s own attempts to find solace in an unjust, confusing world. Daniel’s impressive novel quietly builds, ending in a place where Henry can see the way past his experiences into a much more beautiful, logical future." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Lyrical evocations of nature clash with shocking revelations of human nature in this coming-of-age story... [a] stroll through the wilderness of adolescence and the Oregon woods." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
John Daniel’s books of prose, including Rogue River Journal and The Far Corner, have won three Oregon Book Awards for Literary Nonfiction, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and have been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts among other grants and awards. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he has taught as a writer-in-residence at colleges and universities across the country. Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. Gifted is his first novel.