After reading All My Puny Sorrows , The Flying Troutmans seemed like a possible sketch for the later, more complex work. While it is certainly very good, (and Toews has an amazing capacity to demonstrate how fragile human beings are), I didn’t quite get the same emotional charge here.There are the same sister figures as in Sorrows – the narrator is the younger one, Hattie, with the same low opinion of her own abilities, and an unstable older sister Min, who is often psychotic and sometimes su...

I know that Miriam Toews is a much beloved writer in Canada and one should be kind with one's comments, but I found this road story a bit claustrophobic at times despite the waves of humour that the writer conjures for us. Three people in an ailing van - 28 year-old Aunt Hattie and her 15-year old nephew Logan, the basketball junkie driving without a licence, and his unwashed super-intelligent 11 year-old sister Thebes - all running away from an impossibly suicidal Mum in Manitoba, and searching...

This thing got me from the very first paragraph – it threw me in the back of its van in Winnipeg, and sped off down a dusty, prairie road with me, across borders temporal, geographical and emotional, and it didn’t let me go until it had wrung me out, surprised me, made me laugh, made me cry, made me FEEL oh so much, and then left me on the tarmac in San Diego heading back home, with a grain of hope that yeah, the kids (will be) alright.First up: the voice. A kind of early Tom Robbins whimsy desc...

Miriam Toews saunters along the line between comedy and grief as if she might lose her balance at any moment. But she never does. The precarious tone of her novels about fractured families is the crafted effect of a nimble writer. Raised by Mennonites in a small Canadian town, Toews has developed an irresistible sense of absurdity leavened with real affection for the quirky characters who inhabit her stories.The Flying Troutmans, her fourth novel, invites immediate comparison with the popular in...

Who wouldn't want to go on a road trip with Miriam Toews? This is another top notch delight in an increasingly brilliant career. The best thing about MT's writing is that it manages to be both cool and heartbreakingly sweet. The dialogue is the best thing out of Canada since the movie "Highway 61" and the characters are complex and deeply felt. I am going to marry this book. We will be registered at Macy's.

i have this gr friend i won’t say their name and they read this book and told me jo you should read it it’s sort of like Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones which if you don’t remember is the 2011 national book award winner and describes a poor rural black family before and during hurricane katrinaas you can imagine i was intrigued on account of what can this little canadian romp of a book possibly have in common with salvage the bones which is dead serious and sultry and racked with tragedy and so

RATING: 4 STARSI have read a few books by Toews now, and she is on my list of favourite authors. This just means I will give every book they have written a chance, no matter the genre or topic. So far, I have not cared for one book (Irma Voth) so that is pretty good odds. I will start this review with...this book will not be to every reader's liking. It is a quirky book. The story, the characters, and even the road trip are all quirky. There is a dark humour that helps to balance some tough topi...

Another wonderful story by Miriam Toews. The road trip to find Churkis after Min is hospitalized gives Hattie, Logan and Thebes the chance to determine how to move forward in their lives. In the process, they learn, grow and gain strength. As always, Miriam Toews' writing is funny and heartbreaking. She manages to balance between these two extremes with grace and finesse.

This book, with a mentally ill person as the catalyst, exhibits schizoid traits of its own. My initial reaction: unconvincing and lazy. I didn’t think I’d say this about Toews, winner of the 2004 Governor General’s award for A Complicated Kindness. The Flying Troutmans is my first Toews novel.Mild quibbles kept piling up. Flurries of minor quibbles turned into dumps of significant quibbles, completely snowing under the charm of the book.Toews uses the venerable road trip as a platform for the no...

This is my favorite book. For all this time, whenever I’ve been asked that question, I’ve said, “Oh, there are so many that I love, it’s impossible to pin down just one and call it my favorite.”Now, it’s possible.The characters, the storyline, the writing, the dialog all comes together so that every word is necessary and there aren’t any to spare. It is just perfect.Hattie is on a road trip with her 15 year-old nephew, Logan and 11 year-old niece, Thebes. The kids’ mother, Min, is mentally ill a...

I discovered this book at my favorite bookstore, The Reading Reptile in Kansas City. It's a children's bookstore. So, I really pay attention to the adult books they choose. This was beautifully, sensitively written. In all, the story has been told before. It was about the effect of mental illness on a family, specifically a mother's illness on her children and the sibling left to pick up the pieces. Not sorry I read it. Won't reread it.

Stole my heart, and boy how I would steal little Thebes and keep her forever.Miriam Toew, if I were a writer, I would want to be you.Absolutely astonishing ability to write pathos, black comedy, brave beauty and the most searing of agonies.Favorites!

A beautiful book, both heart-rending and heart-warming at the same time. The three central characters, Hattie (aunt), Thebes, 11 (niece) and Logan, 15 (nephew) are all fantastic but Thebes is the star of the show, with a motor mouth that can't stop producing the weirdest, quirkiest, sweetest things. In what I find just about one of the absurdest, funniest things I've ever read, Thebes dreams there is, previously unbeknownst to her, a thirteenth month, "squeezed somewhere in between February and

WINNER 2008 - Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction PrizeNOMINEE 2009 - Orange PrizeFINALIST 2008 - Margaret Laurence Award for FictionFINALIST 2008 - McNally Robinson Book of the YearThe Flying Troutmans is a sister-love story. It’s a writer-to-reader love story. It’s the only story I can remember where I laughed out loud and my laughter abruptly turned into a sob. I couldn’t go on; I didn’t want to stop. Miriam Toews has written that kind of book.The protagonist, Hattie is sister to psychotic Mim, and...

I've found a new favorite author. This book is hilarious but also hits you where it counts. Here's a little taste, after the narrator Hattie has been picked up from the airport by her (underage) nephew Logan and niece Thebes:"Logan ended up driving back to their house because I didn't know how to tell him not to and because he hadn't seemed interested in relinquishing control of the wheel anyway. Logan and Thebes yelled at each other all the way back, the music cranked the whole time.Thebes: Sta...

If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost. Those words were emblazoned on Min's bedroom wall, burned into the wallpaer with a charred wine-bottle cork. Our parents dismissed them as psuedo-profound, angsty-adolescent babble, but they haunted me. Why should that be? I wondered. How did she know that? Did she really believe it, or did she just like the way those words looked in burnt cork?- from The Flying TroutmansLet's make an analogy between books and buildings. S...

My birth triggered a seismic shift in my sister's life. The day I was born she put her dress on backwards and ran away towards a brighter future, or perhaps toward a brighter past. Our parents found her in a tree next door. Had she been planning to jump? She's been doing that ever since, travelling in two opposite directions at once, towards infancy and death.Hattie and Min have never really been close, but now, Min is a mess - wasted and lethargic. She needs hospitalization and her kids need so...

4.5 stars, rounded up, for another tremendously enjoyable novel by Miriam Toews!! This wasn't my favourite of her novels - to date that title still belongs to A Complicated Kindness - but I loved it. This was, basically, the story of a family of oddballs. Mom Min is admitted (again) to a psychiatric institution, while her kids Thebes (aged 11) and Logan (aged 15) call Min's younger sister Hattie (in Paris) asking her to come home to take care of them while Min is in hospital. Hattie returns to W...

The characters in this book aren't perfect but I feel like I know them. Thebes was one of those characters that will stay with you for a long time. Great story with sad mixed with funny in a way that most authors can't pull off.

I loved this book. I love the people in it and the way MT tells the story. Not sure if I like this or AMPS better. TFT might be my favourite. I feel like I'll miss these characters more.