WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH

At first Pat Bottino’s reading seems flat and expressionless. Then we realize he sounds just the way anybody would sound in the twenties in upper Vermont where the stories take place. In each of them rugged individualists struggle to survive in a beautiful, but forbidding, frontier. More often than not death wins out. especially in the long title story about an ex-logger and his Native American housekeeper who face destruction when a power company comes in to flood their valley. here the narrator is so persuasive, both as the laconic Noel and the feisty Bangor, that the final scenes are as tragic as any in recent American fiction. J.C. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG 95]