The Whistling Season

Three school-age brothers are still mourning the death of their mother on their 1910 Montana homestead when their erudite father answers an ad for a housekeeper. “Can’t cook but doesn’t bite” is the catchy bait Rose uses to hook the job.

She arrives from Minneapolis unexpectedly accompanied by her brother, both of them penniless but willing to work hard. As Rose transforms the slovenly male household, her brother Morrie, educated at University of Chicago, brings a love of learning to the one-room schoolhouse. He enlivens education for all the students, but most especially for the gifted young narrator, Paul, one of two seventh graders.

Adept at describing both the rhythms of family life and the expanse of the prairie, Doig particularly captures the heart of that country, a school that “held together a neighborhood measured in square miles and chimneys as far apart as smoke signals.”

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