Heroes of the Frontier (Eggers) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[A] picaresque adventure and spiritual coming-of-age tale—On the Road crossed with Henderson the Rain King with some nods to National Lampoon's Vacation along the way…. Mr. Eggers has so mastered the art of old-fashioned, straight-ahead storytelling here that the reader quickly becomes immersed in Josie's funny-sad tale…. What injects Josie's story with heartfelt emotion is her relationship with Paul and Ana…. Mr. Eggers's cleareyed portraits of these children remind us of the indelible portrait he created in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius of his 8-year-old brother, Toph, whom he brought up after their parents died within weeks of each other….That bone-deep knowledge of a child's relationship with a parent informs Mr. Eggers's portraits of Paul and Ana, and their love for and dependence upon Josie—by far the strongest and most deeply affecting parts of this absorbing…novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


The common writerly mistake is to slight child characters for lack of a formed intelligence. But by around age 6, the psychologists tell us, we already have the I.Q. and most of the personality we're ever going to get. It's a rich combination—personhood unconstrained by the acquired prejudices of culture—and [Eggers] taps it here with impressive results. He likewise nails single parenthood in all its crowded loneliness and moral angst…Heroes of the Frontier…offers complex, believable characters…The heroes of this frontier are Ana and Paul, a dynamic duo who command us to pay attention to the objects we find in our path, and stop pretending we already know the drill.
Barbara Kingsolver - New York Times Book Review


Among his bestselling literary fiction peers, Dave Eggers alone is engaged in a sustained effort to write about contemporary America. He’s been going at it so regularly, and so swiftly, that he’s keeping pace with the times, if not getting a half-step ahead…. When Eggers draws the present into his fiction, it’s there not just as window dressing or setting; it tells us something about ourselves… Heroes gives us a woman who’s at the end of her rope, in a place of salvation without the wherewithal to seek it, as its promise goes up in flames.”
Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times  
 

This is a novel about America, about what forces people to leave ‘the lower 48’ to seek refuge in a forbidding, unpeopled landscape… Eggers renders it with such passion and good humour, and describes the ‘land of mountains and light’ in such stirring, lustrous prose… There is a feeling of utopianism about the novel, a sense that, in Alaska, some original American dream slumbers just beneath the ice… Heroes of the Frontier acts on the reader like a breath of Alaskan air, cleansing the spirit and lifting the heart.”
Alex Preston - Guardian (UK)


The frontier in Eggers’s appealing and affecting new novel is Alaska, but also, arguably, the adventures of its heroine, Josie.... Eggers’s shaggy plot may not be to all tastes, but his writing is fresh and full of empathy, his observations on modern society apt and insightful.
Publishers Weekly


Eggers, writing with exuberant imagination, incandescent precision, and breathless propulsion, casts divining light on human folly and generosity and the glories and terror of nature. This uproarious quest...is fueled by uncanny insight, revolutionary humor, and profound pleasure in the absurd and the sublime. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


[Josie] is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches.... But...the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story...doesn't meaningfully develop Josie's character.... An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.
Kirkus Reviews