{"id":1643,"date":"2024-08-27T15:37:49","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T22:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/?p=1643"},"modified":"2024-08-27T15:49:18","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T22:49:18","slug":"marking-the-miles-until-home-a-review-of-scott-nadelsons-trust-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/?p=1643","title":{"rendered":"Marking the Miles Until Home: A Review of Scott Nadelson’s TRUST ME"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The fly fisherman who lives in the woods or spends all his free time at the river is such a staple of Northwest writing, it\u2019s almost a clich\u00e9. But in his immensely readable and often touching second novel, award-winning short-story writer Scott Nadelson<\/a>, turns the image on its head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Nadelson’s protagonist, Lewis Nelson (who rarely catches anything), fly fishing serves primarily as a justification for living in the forest and a way to keep his mind from “spinning toward despair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis has more important things to focus on anyway\u2013like keeping up with his sassy and slyly loving 12-year-old daughter, Skye, who stays with him on weekends and, like his ex-wife, constantly reminds him of his shortcomings. Lewis calls Skye Sills<\/em>, short for Silly, his nickname for her as an infant. And while it’s beneath the dignity of any self-respecting 12-year-old to be truly silly, Sills’ often-playful ways save Lewis from that downward spin more than once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An East Coast refugee who fled his native New Jersey and overbearingly Jewish mother to attend college in North Carolina and then move to Oregon, Lewis is anything but the stereotypical Northwest man. Undersized and adverse to confrontation, he\u2019s less skilled with carpentry than his ex-wife and has a tendency to fuck things up. Like his marriage. Or the projects he starts and abandons. And maybe his relationship with Sills, which seems, at first, to be on thin ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Even Lewis\u2019s life in the woods is more accidental than intentional. He talked his wife into buying the cabin he lives in while they were having marital problems, and when she kicked him out, it was the only place he had to go. Now, he commutes too far to his dead-end job doing media relations for the Department of Transportation in Salem, and tries to convince Sills that trees, mushrooms, and rivers are better than social media and Spotify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Told in 52 chapters (one for each weekend in a year)that alternate between Lewis\u2019s and Sills\u2019s perspectives, Trust Me<\/em> tells two entwined love stories. One is between a man-child and his quickly-maturing tween daughter, who, through her often-hilarious sarcasm, helps him grow up. The other is between this father-daughter pair and a Northwest forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Lewis, wanting to please his daughter, arranges for the two of them to spend a night in Portland\u2014having pizza, seeing The Lion King<\/em>, and staying in a hotel\u2014everything about the excursion is disappointing, until they head back to the remote place they have begun to bond in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Photo from unsplash.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here’s how Nadelson narrates the drive back to the cabin, from Sills’s perspective:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time they reach the winding road along the river, they\u2019re both belting out songs from the musical in funny voices, her father doing a Russian accent\u2014the only one he\u2019s good at\u2014Skye trying out what her theater camp director called a Scarlett O\u2019Hara, though her father says she sounds less like a Southern belle than an old coot from the mountains, a gold prospector defending his claim. They laugh and argue, and she watches small green signs tick by, marking the miles until they\u2019re home.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key word in the description is that last one: home<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even as Lewis and Sills seem at odds over his absentmindedness, his tendency to say the wrong thing, his cowardice when reckless men on ATVs menace his property, and a wicked father-daughter game of Risk<\/em>, the growing affection of the girl for the man who bore her is evident and endearing. And when a deadly natural disaster threatens them and the cabin they have come to think of as home, the book\u2019s title becomes less of a plea than a statement and a feeling they share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trust me<\/em> is a tender celebration of the vital yet often-tenuous relationships that mean the most to us and the natural places that have the power to heal us, sustain us, and, at times, break our hearts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo of fly-fisherman by Taylor Grote at unsplash.com<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trust Me<\/a><\/em><\/strong> will be published by Portland’s Forest Avenue Press<\/a> on September 3, 2024. You can pre-order it below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/script>\n\n\n\n

Note: I\u2019m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I\u2019ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining<\/em> this website.<\/em>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fly fisherman who lives in the woods or spends all his free time at the river is such a staple of Northwest writing, it\u2019s almost a clich\u00e9. But in his immensely readable and often touching second novel, award-winning short-story writer Scott Nadelson, turns the image on its head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_swt_meta_header_display":false,"_swt_meta_footer_display":false,"_swt_meta_site_title_display":false,"_swt_meta_sticky_header":false,"_swt_meta_transparent_header":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,99,103],"tags":[454,425,307,145],"class_list":["post-1643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews-news","category-latest-posts","category-nw-people","tag-home","tag-northwest-writers","tag-pacific-northwest-literature","tag-portland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-scaled.jpg","uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-scaled.jpg",2560,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-1024x683.jpg",1024,683,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true],"mailpoet_newsletter_max":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/taylor-grote-V04aAOzlZE-unsplash-1320x880.jpg",1320,880,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"michael n. mcgregor","author_link":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The fly fisherman who lives in the woods or spends all his free time at the river is such a staple of Northwest writing, it\u2019s almost a clich\u00e9. But in his immensely readable and often touching second novel, award-winning short-story writer Scott Nadelson, turns the image on its head.","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1643"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1655,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643\/revisions\/1655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}