Red Hen Press

240 pages, $15.95

Review by Heidi Willis

If you go by the photos of his cowboy-handlebar-mustache and his memoir revelations of fighting mountain lions, the four-time Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award winner Pete Fromm is nothing like the narrators of his novels. He is not a fifteen-year old boy desperately trying to live up to the dreams of his manic sister (How All This Started), and he is decidedly not a coming-of-age girl wrestling with sex and an absent father (As Cool As I Am). Yet by the first page in, you’d forget he is neither of those.

Fromm’s newest novel, If Not for This, takes on an even greater hurdle–writing from the point of view of a woman dying of multiple sclerosis. It is a bold tactic that, under a lesser writer, might tend towards melodrama or cliché. Fromm, however, creates a narrator that crackles with sarcasm, wit, and an authenticity that makes the risk pay off. Continue reading →