Return to Oakpine

Written by Ron Carlson

Narrated by David Aaron Baker

Ron Carlson is a widely respected author whose accolades include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Ploughshares Cohen Prize. Return to Oakpine spins a story of growing up and growing old as four high school friends and former bandmates reconnect 30 years after graduating. When they learn that one of them is dying, it feels like getting the band back together might be the most important thing they can do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781470366285

Ron Carlson

Ron Carlson is the author of several books of fiction, including Five Skies. He directs the graduate program in fiction at the University of California, Irvine.

Reviews for Return to Oakpine

[paradiseporch · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of four middle-aged friends who once played in a band while growing up together in small-town Wyoming. Two eventually moved away and two stayed in Oakpine. But when the friend who became a famous musician comes back home to die, the friends get together to play again.Return to Oakpine was a little too commercial for me, but if you like a story that follows comfortable and predictable lines, then you might quite enjoy this. 3 stars

[cherylk_44 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a fast read but in this case this is not a good thing. Fast because I was going through the motions but not rememberable. I got about half way into the book. Which I stopped at chapter 6. Yes, this is a shorter book then my usual reading at 264 pages. Anyways, I went to pick up this book again to start reading it and promptly put it back down after a page and a half. The reason for this is because I could not remember anything that happened in the first five chapters/half of the book. None of the characters were engaging with their back stories. I did see some brief glimmer of promise that this book could be good but maybe for someone else.

[thelostentwife · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I pick up a book I hope for one of two things: first, I hope that it will be grab you by the seat of your pants good and that I will not be able to put it down because of one or all of (writing, story, characters, setting, voice, passion) my favorite things; second, I hope that if I do not found myself in a grabbed position, that there is something in the book that I cannot stand so much that it'll allow me to put the book down without feeling guilt for not finishing it. Unfortunately, a lot of books do not meet either of those two things - they fall somewhere in the middle and that is exactly where Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson landed.Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on August 31, 2013.

[readingwithtea · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"He'd been a writer, he realized early in his career, because he lived for loveliness and intensity but only if he could know about them, be aware, have the distance and the words that would make them ring and ring in him."Jimmy Brand has come home to die. Thirty years after leaving his hometown in the wake of his brother's tragic death, after a career as a successful journalist and author, he moves back into his parents' garage because his father won't have him in the house. His old bandmates rally round, bound by ties of loyalty and friendship, nostalgia and remorse.This is a tricky one. Carlson writes beautiful set pieces. Larry's fixation with running around the town, running away from the suburban prison, while happily fulfilling the role of his father's apprentice is crystal clear and smooth. And yet I was bored, I was fed up with these people.On the one hand, the setting feels stagnated; the town is fixed in its introspective isolation. Maybe I'm imprinting my own ambitions and drive on the characters, but the lives chronicled are so sadly ambivalent, mediocre and shambolic. No one's relationships have turned out the way they should have - divorces, premature widowerhood and mental affairs abound. On the other hand, maybe that's more real, and maybe Carlson's gift is in capturing that, when too many writers are keen to have fiction make vivid that which is so rare in reality.This is very much a type book; if you liked Sense of an Ending, or When God Was A Rabbit, or maybe The Spare Room (Spare Room is the best of these), you will enjoy this. If you're not a fan of nostalgiaville, stay away.