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Gabriel Du Pre has some good friends, probably due to the fact that Gabriel is a good friend to have. One of his friends is an accordion player named Tally. Tally (if I am reading the story correctly) was born with spina bifida and still has numerous health problems related to it all his life. Du Pre's friend Bart picks up the tab for a trip to the Mayo Clinic when a bad infection makes Tally's life particularly difficult. Tally asks Du Pre to look into the health problems of children born and raised in the same place where Tally was raised, because he thinks something is going very wrong. Bart also picks up the tab for a cousin of Madeleine's (Madeleine is Du Pre's woman, as she is -- so non-PC -- referred to in all the Du Pre books) when she wants/needs some time in an alcohol rehab facility. Jeanne Bouyer is a Stick Game player for the Gros Ventre tribe. "Stick Game . . .the one got the bundle of sticks, seventeen or twenty-one, she hold them behind her back and the other team guesses how many she got in each hand. But while they are guessing they got to tell stories, stickholder she tell stories back, sometimes songs. Each story, better than the last. Three times, the guessing team tells a better story, the stick-holder has to tell them what she got in each hand, they win, or they can guess, try to be lucky. Tough game." The game will become, by the end of the book, an obvious metaphor for what else is going on. Jeanne is having problems because one of her children, Danny, has run off. Du Pre looks for him, and finds him (or what's left of him) in an old well. Danny has always been slow, but has gotten worse/different in the last few years. One of Jeanne's other children, Mickey, was born deaf and mute. Some of Bart's money comes from his ownership in the Persephone gold mining company. Persephone uses a technique which involves leaching the gold from the soil with cyanide. This technique also precipitates other heavy metals (including lead and selenium) into the groundwater. The company has used its political clout to eviscerate the legal monitoring system, which is supposed to prevent this kind of environmental damage. Bart is considering using some of his money, and he does have an incredible amount of it, to help fund an archeological dig in an area which Persephone wants to mine. There is a lot going on in THE STICK GAME, and between the two of them, Gabriel and Bart have a finger in all the pies. While I enjoyed this book, and learned more than I might have wanted to know about what this kind of gold mining does to the groundwater, I don't think this is Bowen's best book. I don't get a feeling, as I have in other books, that Gabriel is truly emotionally vested in everything that he's doing. He does what he knows he should do, for all the right reasons, but I don't get the sense that he is as angry about it as I've seen him in other books. What this says about Bowen's ability to bring life to a character is obvious -- he makes all these people seem so real that I believe they exist somewhere, that they have feelings and emotions. If you are a fan of Peter Bowen, this is a good Bowen book. Perhaps not his best, not the one I would recommend to someone looking to start a new author. I think most authors would be very pleased to write a book as good as THE STICK GAME; for Peter Bowen, it's a good book, just not his best.
Reviewed by P J Coldren, May 2004
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