Summary: Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.
My Review: Leif Enger is one of those authors who, when I see a new book coming out, I just read. I know it’s going to be a story I enjoy because he’s an excellent author and I always love his writing style. If you haven’t read Peace Like a River, I highly recommend starting there and just continuing on to his others. I even met a woman at my kid’s baseball game yesterday who asked what I was reading and when she saw it was by Leif Enger, she was like “Oh! I’m so glad to hear he has a new book out! I always read his stuff.” So there ya go. Even random baseball lady agrees.
This story is different than I expected. For one thing, I didn’t really expect it to be post-apocalyptic, although those stories can be very interesting. Unlike many dystopian YA novels I’ve read, Enger spends basically no time on describing what happened in order to lead the world into what it is in the story, but that was totally fine. We didn’t need it. It isn’t really a story about that, anyway. As with all of Enger’s books, its about so much more than just a simple description. Yes, it’s about a man who lives in a dystopian America and lives next to Lake Superior, but it is also about so much more than that. It’s about people who pick up the pieces after a societal collapse, and how they choose to live. Some are good, some are bad, and some are just surviving. It’s also about relationships and learning who to trust and how to work with those who’ve you encountered, whether they be good or bad.
Ultimately, on the surface, this is a story about a man who has faced incredible sorrows and losses, and who sets out to lose himself but finds himself in the end. And yes, that’s overly simplistic. And yes, just like life, that is the basic throughline. However, the story is all about what happens in the middle of all of that.
I very much enjoyed this book and the story. It’s not a very long book and it was an easy, accessible read. I really enjoy the writing style of Enger, and this book is no exception.
My Rating: 4.5 Stars
For the sensitive reader: Dystopian society always provides for some scary scenarios, but this is a pretty tame book for that genre.
