THE LEGEND OF COLTON H. BRYANT

Colton Bryant, a young Wyoming roughneck more eighteenth century than twenty-first, always said that when he died, people would be sorry they'd made him waste so much time in school, which he disliked, and was bad at. He did die young—falling from an oil rig—and they were sorry. Fuller tries valiantly to create an aura of poignancy and meaning around Colton with her prose style, which is indeed beautiful, if overheated for some tastes. For the listener, the experience might have succeeded if Ed Sala had made Colton as lovable as his family and friends found him. Perhaps it was an impossible task, or it may be that Sala's squeaky rendering of Colton's most common expression—“holy crap!”—or his laugh as a foolish-sounding "heh-heh-heh" dooms the venture. B.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2008]