From the cover:
"In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an axious twelve-year-old boy fatally mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives - to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto - pusued over the years by the implacable constable. Their lone proctor is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them and distantly watches over them like a vast, idiosyncratic guardian..."

Gelesen im Rahmen der Bergabbau-Challenge im Juli 2015 - Thema: Welcome to Goodbye

Hmm, somehow all Irving novels are the same. Not that they are not good - but somehow I got bored by this one. I was not so fascinated and sucked into the story as at reading Garp or Widow for one Year. I was already to familiar with all the motives.
Also all that writing theory stuff and the comments about readers and critics: It makes me feel as if the author wants to force me to like his novel by telling me: "If don't like it, then it is because you are to stupid to understand it. Look at all the work I put into it!". - And always he is justifying his way of writing. Maybe I would have liked the novel better if I was not squeezed to do so.

Kaffeeküche, 1. Stock, BG7