Library Journal - Audio
★ 09/01/2022
Narrator Brittany Pressley's empathetic delivery adds more tenderness to this captivating coming-of-age story, the fifth novel from Kirkus Prize finalist Roorbach (The Remedy of Love). Cindra Zoeller lives in Boston with her beloved, brilliant son Ricky and her unpleasant partner Walter—an older man who had been her therapist. From this mostly stable vantage point, Cindra recalls her tumultuous teenage years. Present during a felonious assault at age 16, she was sentenced to Camp Challenge reform school in Montana. Though she loves the outdoors, Cindra finds the austere camp oppressive, until she gets to know Lucky, the school's inscrutable van driver, a handsome young man she believes to be Crow. When Lucky rescues Cindra from solitary confinement, they escape and live off the grid for a time, with the help of friends. As former city girl Cindra learns wildness survival skills, Pressley gives her a voice that waivers between excitement at this incredible adventure and longing for her father and the creature comforts of civilization. Pressley lingers over Roorbach's poetic descriptions of the spectacular landscape, making listeners feel as though they are sitting beside the characters under the vast Montana sky. VERDICT Perfect for anyone seeking a charming, well-told adventure.—Beth Farrell
JULY 2022 - AudioFile
Brittany Pressley’s sweet voice, with its hint of vocal fry, is the ideal vehicle for this transporting novel of hardship, love, and redemption. Listeners meet teenage Cindra Zoeller in the 1990s, when she is sent to a Montana reform camp. Soon, she and the camp’s young handyman, Lucky Turtle, have fallen in love. They begin an unforgettable lifelong odyssey by escaping into the Montana wilderness. For more than that, you must listen. Pressley captures Cindra’s mix of skepticism and naïveté, and shapes a considered tone for Lucky, reflecting his thoughtful personality. Native Crow characters are honored with realistic speech patterns. Action sequences are staccato. And the novel’s bounteous lyricism, and its love for landscape and people, are delivered with heart-brimming appreciation. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
02/28/2022
Roorbach’s sprawling latest (after the collection The Girl of the Lake) focuses on a white girl’s coming-of-age and the men in her life. At 16, in the late 1990s, Cindra Zoeller is charged as an accomplice for armed robbery with her boyfriend, Dag, the older brother of a schoolmate. Dag, who is Puerto Rican, gets 20 years, while Cindra is sent to a Montana camp for juvenile delinquents. There she meets 20-something Lucky, who works as the camp’s driver, whom she initially takes to be Crow before learning he’s half Chinese and half white, and was raised by an adoptive Crow woman on the reservation. After learning the camp doctor regularly molests the girls, Cindra enacts a plan to stop him. Later, she escapes with Lucky’s help. Roorbach disturbingly writes Lucky as a noble savage type: though illiterate, he has supreme wilderness survival skills, and he’s a virgin. Of course, the pair’s idyllic time hunting, fishing, telling stories, and having sex won’t last, and Cindra faces great hardships in later years. Though the author has a knack for describing the natural beauty of the landscape, the mess of episodic scenes and backstories drags this down. This has its moments, but there isn’t much in the way of staying power. Agent: Barbara Zitwer, Barbara J. Zitwer Agency. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
An unforgettable love story.”—People “Fans of Roorbach’s prolific work will appreciate his signature lyricism and sense of place, his sweeping narrative, humor and romance. New readers are walking into the hands of a skilled storyteller who’s not afraid to take on a big, messy tale of love, privilege and abuse.”—New York Times Book Review “Nobody else could have written this gorgeous novel, full to the brim with tragedy but also fun, as well as the best kind of romance —embracing so much more than the couple at its center. Cindra is an impeccably loyal and honest narrator, our perfect guide through the wilds of Montana. Lucky Turtle is an ode and a love letter to our wounded, imperfect, and oh-so-beautiful world.” —Nina de Gramont, author of The Christie Affair “No one writes about love or the American wilderness like Bill Roorbach. A thrilling, blistering tale of young love and old hate and the steady endurance of both.” —Lily King, author of Five Tuesdays in Winter “Look out: Roorbach has created the sexiest man seen in literature in a good long time . . . An epic love story . . . No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Roorbach is a consummate raconteur skilled in breathing life into his characters. His prose is well-suited to the Montana landscape, capacious yet created with poetic economy, evoking the splendor of nature in language that sparkles like crystal clear mountain water . . . Roorbach’s understated, luminescent novel beautifully evokes an idyllic world created when two hearts are braided together.” —Booklist, starred review “An engrossing novel with standout characters.”—Library Journal, starred review “Two great love affairs—one between characters, the other with the wilds of Montana as its original inhabitants knew it—surge through this engaging, audacious novel. Every page hums with life and energy.” —Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Archangel “At once an adventure, a love story, and a profound meditation on the grandeur of the natural world, Lucky Turtle is a novel so full of beauty and heart and pathos that you won’t want it to end, a book that hums with grace, and sings with passion. Roorbach is a national treasure.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Small World “Roorbach delivers a most electric pulse into the hardscrabble dirt and veins in this novel's memorable backdrop of ancient Montana mountains and waters. Lucky Turtle gives us a world where adventure and landscape combine tenderly for a most unforgettable read.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders “A story of love and heartbreak in a world of breathtaking splendor and deep injustice, Bill Roorbach's Lucky Turtle is a novel of perseverance, brimming with entertaining dialogue and rich details of the flora and fauna of the West.”—Shelf Awareness “A new kind of romance… [and] a love letter to the beauty and power of Montana… The tensions don’t simmer here but roil, making for an emotionally challenging, worthwhile and truly special read.”—BookReporter “A sweeping coming-of-age tale of romance – and heartbreak… An expansive and empathic novel.” —Portland Press Herald and Central Maine “An unforgettable love story set starkly against Montana Wilderness.”—Largehearted Boy, starred review
Library Journal
★ 04/01/2022
Unfolding over decades, this tale of love and intolerance from Kirkus Prize finalist Roorbach (The Remedy for Love) is narrated by Cindra Zoeller, who grows up in a wealthy family near Boston but loves the great outdoors. Little does she know that her association with a Cuban boyfriend and his gang would send her into the wilderness at age 16 for her involvement in a violent crime. Now she's serving three years in a rural Montana reform camp for girls, while her less-privileged boyfriend does 20 years' hard time. It isn't long before Cindra lands in harsh solitary for telling the truth about the lascivious camp doctor. Her rescuer is her lover Lucky Turtle, an enigmatic loner who drives the camp's van; his knowledge of Crow wisdom and traditions keeps them alive when they flee the camp and go deeper into the wilderness to elude an exhaustive manhunt. Cindra relates their plight from the viewpoint of her current life in Boston, where she's living her former camp therapist, Walter, who controls her every move and blames her for her own troubles. Her one hope is her brilliant son Ricky, who helps Cindra devise a plan to reconnect with Lucky. VERDICT Just how Roorbach dovetails Cindra's two disparate lives gives her story intensity and shows the power of love from many sources. An engrossing novel with standout characters.—Donna Bettencourt
JULY 2022 - AudioFile
Brittany Pressley’s sweet voice, with its hint of vocal fry, is the ideal vehicle for this transporting novel of hardship, love, and redemption. Listeners meet teenage Cindra Zoeller in the 1990s, when she is sent to a Montana reform camp. Soon, she and the camp’s young handyman, Lucky Turtle, have fallen in love. They begin an unforgettable lifelong odyssey by escaping into the Montana wilderness. For more than that, you must listen. Pressley captures Cindra’s mix of skepticism and naïveté, and shapes a considered tone for Lucky, reflecting his thoughtful personality. Native Crow characters are honored with realistic speech patterns. Action sequences are staccato. And the novel’s bounteous lyricism, and its love for landscape and people, are delivered with heart-brimming appreciation. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-02-04
A teenage girl sent to reform school in deepest Montana meets the love of her life the day she arrives—the school's van driver.
"The driver was my age, maybe a little older, slender, huge cowboy hat and cowboy boots and cowboy buckle. He wore a long black braid tied with rawhide and thicker rawhide bands around his wiry biceps....He smelled like some distant burning, I can hardly explain it, studied my eyes whenever I was required to cooperate, didn’t put his hands on me, didn’t ask any questions, didn’t offer any greetings, not a word from his mouth." Look out: Roorbach has created the sexiest man seen in literature in a good long time. This is Lucky Turtle, who, as 16-year-old Cindra Zoeller is about to learn, just keeps getting better the more you know him; his wilderness survival skills—which will come seriously into play—verge on the supernatural. What's more, the very next time they're alone together, taking the camp laundry into town, he reveals that his clairvoyant aunt has foreseen that she will be his wife. Fans of Roorbach's work—most recently The Girl of the Lake (2017)—have been waiting five years for this book and will not be disappointed. Again, the man has cooked up a completely captivating world, just a touch more magical and interesting than the real one. This time, it's a place called Turtle Butte, where a disgraced television actress has turned her attention to reforming misguided female youth at a facility called Camp Challenge. It's a slowly unfolding, complicated, suspenseful plot; it's safe to say that Cindra will not be reformed. There's no lane-staying for White guy Roorbach: His teenage-girl narrator is flawless; Chinese, Haitian, and Native characters are beautifully done. (Many sensitivity readers are thanked in the acknowledgments.) Lucky Turtle has his woodland lore and Native rituals; Cindra has her copy of Hawaii,which they read aloud from every night: "Michener was strong medicine."
An epic love story and love letter to the West. No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.
