I Cheerfully Refuse

I read I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger on audiobook for book club. The book description says, "Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake."

I really enjoyed this book. The story was engaging, and it was beautifully written. There were parts (even on audiobook!) that just stuck out to me and made me want to write them down. Like Rainy's description of Lark as "making the world better by being in it." The book was one of those ones that just made me amazed how authors even come up with storylines because the book had so many twists and turns that I never really knew where things were going, but I enjoyed it all. I always loved Rainy as a steady character who stayed true to who he was. I loved Sol and the parts where Rainy was reading to her and teaching her the letters. There were super annoying characters (the grandpa) and characters who just made the book worth reading (can't think of their names at the moment but the couple who Rainy meets who helps him and then he goes back to them in the end) and characters who were disturbing (Werryck). The book also just had an underlying message about the power of books, which I thought was beautiful. The story had some heavy parts and parts where it was just another bad thing and I had to put the book down for a bit to just cope before I could bear it again, but that just shows how engaging the story was. Overall, this was a great read--I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

Rating: * * * (3/3 = Loved it)