The Whistling Season, by Ivan Doig

I'm in a bit of a state of awe over this book. The way it captures such meaning, and the essence of where education has been and where it's headed, was a real treat for me to enjoy. I felt that the book was about schools, schooling, students, teachers, parents, and community - as much or more than I felt it was about the story of Paul's family and the season of life they were in. What can I say? I'm a teacher.

That said, the story line is intriguing and well thought out. The syntax is a bit over-worked, but lavish and meaningful. The crossing of four such bright minds in a rural dry-farming community in the middle of (nowhere) Montana is something to enjoy - the wit and spectacle keeps the reader hopping and hoping.
My favorite passage comes as the main character, Paul, remembers drawing water from the well in his schoolyard back when he was a child.

    Out beyond the play area, there were round rims of shadow on the patch of prairie where the horses we rode to school had eaten the grass down in circles around their picket stakes. Perhaps that pattern drew my eye to what I had viewed every day of my school life but never until then truly registered: the trails in the grass that radiated in as many directions as there were homesteads with children, all converging to that schoolyard spot where I stood unnaturally alone.
    Forever and a day could go by, and that feeling will never leave me. Of knowing, in that instant, the central power of that country school in all our lives. It reached beyond those of us answering [the teacher's] role call that first day... Everyone I could think of had something at stake in the school... The mothers dispatched their hearts and souls out the door every morning as they sent waist-high children to saddle up and ride miles to school. We all answered, with some part of our lives, to the pull of this small knoll of prospect, this isolate square of schoolground.
    There at the waiting pump I could not sort out such matters totally, but even then, I am convinced, began in me some understanding of how much was recorded on that prairie, in those trails leading to the school. How their pattern held together a neighborhood measured in square miles and chimneys as far apart as smoke signals. I would say, if I were asked now, that the mounted troupes of schoolchildren taking their bearing on that schoolhouse on its prairie high spot traveled as trusting and true in their aim as the first makers of roads sighted onto a distant cathedral spire.

Paul attended school in that one-room building and loves what it stands for. Now grown, he has become the head of all the schools in the state and is asked to close all the one-room schoolhouses in favor of bigger, supposedly better schools for the children. This book is his memories of one year of his schooling and the impact that visiting the area, with his childhood home and schoolhouse, has on the decision he will present to the board.

I taught in a fairly rural community, with many students who could have ridden horseback to school if they'd chosen to. I read this book in one day, almost in one sitting. I wolfed it down and will spend a long time digesting it. It was good, healthy food for my teacher's soul.