The Flying Troutmans » (Bargain)

Miriam Toews is the author of three previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding and A Complicated Kindness (winner of the 2004 Governor’s General Award for fiction) and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Winnipeg.

Meet the Troutmans. Hattie's boyfriend has just dumped her, her sister Min's back in the psych ward, and Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively.

Responding to a distress call from Thebes, Hattie returns from Paris to take care of her niece and nephew, only to realize that the responsibility is far greater than she'd expected. Basketball-mad Logan is infatuated with New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon, while purple-haired Thebes's hip-hop vernacular grates on everybody's nerves. She decides to take the kids in the family van (think Little Miss Sunshine) to go find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art galley in South Dakota.

What ensues is a remarkable journey that takes them across the United States, where amidst the diverse personal chaos, they discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

invites immediate comparison with the popular indie movie "Little Miss Sunshine." Like Michael Arndt's film, it's about a collection of oddball family members on a cross-country road trip toward a highly unlikely goal. Deadpan irony and hip cultural references abound. But Toews steps over the camp and sentimentality of "Little Miss Sunshine" and displays a sharper sense of the grinding tragedy of mental illness…Yes, the road trip storyline is a little tread-worn, but Toews has created such an engaging cast for this 2,000-mile trek that you'll never be tempted to ask, "Are we there yet?" Most of the novel's success stems from the fact that Min's two witty children are irresistible characters, alternately vulnerable, affectionate, terrified, brave and annoying…There is no false promise in this story, just an awareness that in this chaotic world the only stability comes from our love for one another, quirks and all. In Toews's hands, that can be funny or heartbreaking, usually at the same time.