A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

Overview

From the heartlands of the 1880s Upper Midwest comes a morality tale of survival and destiny told in the convincing language of a patriarch’s journal, evoking a real sense of the time and place. Gerhardt Praeger, a farmer of some education and plenty experience, understands the mixture of hard work, ingenuity, ethic, grace and steadiness of spirit needed to hold his settler family and neighboring community together while homesteading the hard territory of the Dakotas. He, along with his wife and seven sons, must constantly contend with natural disasters and manmade challenges to carve out their holdings in an unforgiving environment that has defeated so many of their neighbors, sending them home to their families back east. Praeger believes that God will provide sufficiently if not in abundance to those who can resist over-reaching. But a new neighbor, the bold Beidermann, who seems at times almost larger than life, stirs both his curiosity and envy, and tests Praeger’s moral beliefs. Between his remarkable journal entries that observe the increasingly tense events between them, is also a narrative that moves the everyone toward calamity. What results is an almost biblical story of moral imperatives and self-revelation, of man striving to civilize his own impulses along with the wild land.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932961362
Publisher:	Unbridled Books
Publication date:	05/03/2007
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

With his second novel, essayist and short story writer Zimpel (Meeting the Bear; Journal of the Black Wars) has written a memorable work of historical fiction in the vernacular of 1880s upper Midwest settlers. Much of the action unfolds via the journal entries of Gerhardt Praeger, an older, fairly literate farmer/rancher who shares his home with his earthy wife, Ma, and a brood of seven sons. Capturing Praeger's attention is a new bachelor neighbor, Leo Beiderman, whose knack for self-sufficiency and strokes of good fortune become a source of envy. Beiderman, a grateful yet at times swaggering man, is careful not to seem too greedy as he builds his barn and brings in successful harvests. Still, he often provokes animosity, and even his befriending of the two youngest Praegers, twins who openly admire him, doesn't ease the tensions. Zimpel keenly depicts the hard existence of these settlers, who are often put under by floods, blizzards, pestilence, and drought. With their strong family loyalty, sense of fairness, deep respect for animals, and willingness to help friends and neighbors when catastrophe strikes, the people who inhabit this story are fundamentally commendable folks. And in their world it is fitting that when malice occurs, a sense of justice ultimately prevails. A worthwhile addition to all historical fiction collections and larger library fiction collections.-Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

“To read Lloyd Zimpel's superb new novel (his first in 40 years and well worth the wait), "A Season of Fire & Ice," is to be reminded, in gripping detail, of the pride we can all take in immigrant American grit….Zimpel tells his tale with masterful economy, and yet with a rich linguistic vein that brings the 1880s alive as swiftly as his compendious knowledge of the detail of farming a century and more ago. As a novelist, and not just as a historian, he is also the master of his craft...a true page-turner. The suspense, as the neighborly drama unfolds, tightens like a tourniquet. Compare the hold such a tale exerts on the imagination to the experience of reading contemporary novels in which so much anguish is expended on a life of so few rigors, as opposed to the Praegers' seasons, as Zimpel says, of fire and ice. …But these are not pages of poverty-stricken lives. At the worst of times, the food Ma Praeger manages to conjure up will make the reader salivate. The fields may be barren when times are hard, but human resourcefulness is celebrated on every page of Zimpel's book, and there is a glory in it. It's this, and not only the suspenseful writing, that makes "A Season of Fire & Ice" so hard to put down. This is a splendid book, and it belongs on every reader's bookshelf as a reminder of the forging of America.”—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Zimpel has crafted a bone-chilling ending worthy of the likes of Cormac McCarthy…. elegant and memorable.”—The Denver Post

“A skillful evocation of a time, a place, a temperature.…a stark morality tale told with tongues of fire in a landscape of ice.”—January Magazine

“[A] richly envisioned story…. convincing . . . precise, insightful style . . . What is most remarkable is the way the lives of Zimpel's characters and the land they live upon are inseparable."—The Salt Lake Tribune

“Zimpel conveys a strong sense of place in a novel based partly on his grandparents’ lives and pioneer journals…The author incorporates some vivid, sense-evoking descriptions into his story…I was compelled to find out what would happen…Readers of this book will intensely experience the anguish of the 19th century high plains farmer…”—Historical Novels Review

“With his second novel, essayist and short story writer Zimpel (Meeting the Bear; Journal of the Black Wars) has written a memorable work of historical fiction in the vernacular of 1880s upper Midwest settlers...Zimpel keenly depicts the hard existence of these settlers, who are often put under by floods, blizzards, pestilence, and drought. With their strong family loyalty, sense of fairness, deep respect for animals, and willingness to help friends and neighbors when catastrophe strikes, the people who inhabit this story are fundamentally commendable folks. And in their world it is fitting that when malice occurs, a sense of justice ultimately prevails. A worthwhile addition to all historical fiction collections and larger library fiction collections.”—Library Journal

“Recall[s] both the austere emotional ground of Annie Proulx and the contradictory machismo of Jim Harrison.”—The Rocky Mountain News

From the Publisher