July 24, 2023
Gumbiner’s suspenseful sophomore novel (after The Boatbuilder) follows the struggles of a California grape-grower and his family during the fire season that shatters their quiet lives. As summer hits, Benjamin Hecht, 65, becomes concerned over the dry conditions on the family’s farm in the foothills near the small town of Natoma. Things are tight for Ben, who usually sells grapes to two wineries, and his wife, Ada, a writer, but after she finishes her next book, they plan to pay off the loan on their property. Ben has a strained relationship with his son, Yoel, in part because a decade earlier, Ben served 18 months in prison for growing marijuana. One day, smoke inundates the hills and an evacuation order forces the family to flee. Later, they return to find their farm mostly spared but their outbuildings burnt, along with Ada’s manuscript, which she mistakenly left behind. They worry they’ll have to sell the farm, but Ben decides to partner with a young winemaker, and they push to harvest the grapes. Gumbiner skillfully builds tension as the Hecht family’s hard work in the vineyards plays out, pulling them together, even as they ignore the red-flag fire warnings and face the uncertainty of whether the wine produced will be potentially ruined by smoke taint. Readers will be riveted. Agent: Martha Wydysh, Trident Media Group.
August 15, 2023
A rural California family, struggling to make financial and emotional ends meet, faces the destructive threat of wildfires. In the gold country of the California foothills, a place of picturesque natural beauty, residents know full well that conditions are always primed for a forest fire, that, in the words of Wallace Stegner--used here as an epigraph--the beautiful land ultimately "imposes itself" on them, and "sets the rules for [their] existence." Briefly imprisoned a decade ago for growing medical marijuana, 65-year-old grape farmer Ben Hecht has been keeping a low profile, a little tired but grateful to have returned to his challenging yet rewarding farm life and to Ada, his novelist wife. Like early-evening sunlight streaming down the mountains, their world lately has been looking good, even promising. Their son, Yoel, has been painfully estranged from Ben, but now, back home after working in Los Angeles, seems surprisingly interested in reconciliation. Family and new friends surround them, proffering glasses of good wine or an occasional joint, just as they are surrounded by a happy menagerie of dogs, chickens, geese, and emus. There has even emerged the distinct possibility of Ben starting a wine-making business. Then, one day, a distant black plume of smoke changes everything. The wildfire that eventually tears through the area hurts the Hechts financially, but it is the obliteration of Ada's work in progress that tips the family into a tailspin--this, and Yoel's sudden involvement with an environmental group preparing to move from complaint to physical action, and Ben's now-constant, justified worry of another, greater fire that would plunge them into poverty. Gumbiner examines the minutiae of the Hecht family's life, their viniculture, their industry, their mellow California woods culture, sometimes to the detriment of narrative action, but his characters glow tenderly on the page. They are a good group of people to root for, at the shifting mercy of the winds that blow past their heads, trapped inside an ecosystem heating up steadily, past the point of hopeful disregard. Gumbiner crafts an important story, the fictional equivalent of outdoor warning sirens screaming above smoldering pine trees. An engaging, Steinbeckian look at climate change and its emotional costs.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
October 1, 2023
The fires had never crossed the canyon in Ben's lifetime, but now he, his wife, Ada, and his estranged son, Yoel, must pack up the livestock from their California farm and head to the safety of his brother's place. When they return, they find that their house was spared, but their barn and novelist Ada's only manuscript for her next book have been destroyed. Gumbiner (The Boatbuilder, 2018) captures the rhythms of Ben's ceaseless work on his grapevine harvest and of the larger, multilayered rural community that has learned to live with the constant threat that the next fire could be the worst. As father and son slowly begin to repair the relationship that was damaged when Ben was jailed for growing medical cannabis, Yoel leaves his L.A. life to join an activist group bent on disrupting the fossil fuel industry. Ben grapples with the potential cost of Yoel's fight and the danger posed by the next big fire in this strikingly real and compelling portrayal of a community on the brink of utter devastation.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.