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**LOOKOUT received a 2023 Montana Book Award Honor and was short-listed for the Center for Fiction's 2023 First Novel prize **
"Lookout tells the story of the Kinzlers, a working-class family firmly rooted in Northwest Montana. Set beneath big skies and spanning four decades, Lookout is an unvarnished look at contemporary life in the rural mountain west, and the interior worlds of people who are different than their surfaces imply. Josiah and Margaret Kinzler have forged an unusual bond marked by both tenderness and distance; their daughters, Cody and Louisa, grow up watching their parents navigate what it means to be true to yourself and what that costs. LOOKOUT offers a gripping dual coming-of-age: Cody’s from stoic ranch kid to hotshot firefighter to resilient woman learning to rely on others, and Josiah’s as he struggles to thrive in a world that has misunderstood him. Bound by their love of the land, the Kinzlers work to bridge the gaps created by what they leave unspoken. LOOKOUT brings to life a family coming out to itself, at home in a new and nuanced American West." |
LOOKOUT offers a stunning portrait of a family firmly rooted to the land in northwest Montana. Told through numerous points of view,
in authentic voices, and with a poetic ear for language, this is the kind of novel one becomes a part of. --Big Sky Journal
Byl writes with intense technical and interpersonal detail—the life of work, mind, and relationships all mingling in compelling
intricacies of action, thought, speech, silence, and all that silence contains. --Jessica Johnson for Terrain.org
There’s a great deal of love in this book — often complicated, always genuinely depicted, never with a hint of sentimentality. Readers will come away with full and aching hearts, the best thing that can be said about any novel. --Nancy Lord for Anchorage Daily News
in authentic voices, and with a poetic ear for language, this is the kind of novel one becomes a part of. --Big Sky Journal
Byl writes with intense technical and interpersonal detail—the life of work, mind, and relationships all mingling in compelling
intricacies of action, thought, speech, silence, and all that silence contains. --Jessica Johnson for Terrain.org
There’s a great deal of love in this book — often complicated, always genuinely depicted, never with a hint of sentimentality. Readers will come away with full and aching hearts, the best thing that can be said about any novel. --Nancy Lord for Anchorage Daily News
Praise for LOOKOUT
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"In Lookout, Christine Byl traces family heartbreak crack by crack with exceptional and steely grace. It's incredibly hard for a writer to evoke the tenderness that passes between parents and children, and the affection that passes between sisters who could be rivals but choose to be friends, without straying into the sentimental, but Byl does just that, and I'm so glad as a reader to have received that rare gift. Each gorgeously written, deeply felt sentence radiates what Raymond Carver once called a small, good thing, and these characters, and the wild Montana landscape they love, are indelible because of it. This book and its singular music will stay with you."
--Carlene Bauer, author of Francis & Bernard and Girls They Write Songs About ___________________________________________ "What a beautiful book. In Lookout, each character’s struggle to live authentically is as rich and clearly rendered as the Montana landscape that sustains them. In this lyric, moving story of family and self, Christine Byl explores the costs of what the Kinzler family chooses to withhold from one another, and what they eventually reveal.” --Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity and Whiting Award winner |
“Beneath the myths of
the American west, or perhaps soaring above them, ordinary lives play out, ordinary families find their ways, the ordinary daily, always comparing itself to the false glorious the landscape promises. In Lookout, Christine Byl brings a Montana family to life over rich decades, and nothing could be more extraordinary. Love and loss, laughter and mayhem, triumph and disaster, animals wild and domestic, timeless geography, lingering trouble, romance, difference, fire. Beautifully written, compelling, and deeply affecting, Lookout lets us love what's real in the dying light of legends." --Bill Roorbach, author of Lucky Turtle, Life Among Giants, and Girl of the Lake. |
"Lookout exudes a grounded know-how increasingly rare in American fiction. This novel overflows with genuine precision. Byl's grasp of complex livelihoods and distinctive voices exudes the authority of lived experience and creates a sense of community via sheer reading pleasure. This book gave me mysterious dreams. It let me relive the raising of my own two daughters. Its description of how to fell a hundred foot larch could enable a careful reader with modest chainsaw skills to drop such a tree safely. Most powerfully, Byl's portrayals of human beings communicating and miscommunicating, of things beautifully said and done and tragically left unsaid and undone, sometimes left me speechless, other times in tears tinged by grief and by joy. Finally, the woodshop she so meticulously portrays, the tools therein mastered, the unique furniture, shelves and woodworking art produced, and electrifying scenes that occur in that charmed yet haunted space, turned the shop itself, for me, into the novel’s most unforgettable character. To read Byl is to marvel. This work exemplifies some of the greatest mysteries of the novel form: how keen attention to the particular can lead to an unsayable sense of the universal; how fidelity to the ordinary lets us glimpse the extraordinary; how wrong we can be ever to rush to judgments that exclude forgiveness. Lookout, and Christine, are worthy of compare to the greater Northwest’s fiction-writing best.
— David James Duncan author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House |
