Product Description

The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie ,Washington , "to reinvent the American family." The Bohm's are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America . Their makeshift pastoral takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and romanticism taking the family deeper into the woods to destroy them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the buildup to the first Gulf War. Sweeping in scope yet unerringly precise in its detail, Shoot the Buffalo conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with its stubborn twin - the Romantic ideal of nature - to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1641396 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 515 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nine-year-old Aldous Bohm is relegated the task of watching out for his two younger siblings in the woods of Snoqualmie, Wash., where his family lives an edenic existence in the experimental '70s, his parents and Uncle Oliver, a Vietnam vet who inhabits their attic, doing drugs. That the youngest child, Adrian, dies of hypothermia when the three siblings set out desperately in the cold rain to look for their neglectful parents, leaves Aldous, who later enlists in the army, wracked by guilt. Aldous's parents' lack of ambition (and his uncle's antiestablishment rhetoric) results in his becoming a painfully judgmental adult. This first novel from short story writer Briggs feels cleanly bifurcated, as Aldous's coming-of-age alternates with his strenuous life in boot camp, where he is mocked for his conformity and meets his first love, sympathetic fellow soldier Janet. His visits on leave to his now divorced parents, living separately in Seattle in a kind of fuzzy lobe of amnesia, feel like a cheap shot, but on the whole Briggs offers an earnest, muscular indictment of the dropout counterculture. (Dec.)
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From School Library Journal
Adult/High School When his parents and uncle leave nine-year-old Aldous Bohm and his two siblings alone in the woods, he panics. Instead of staying within the warm security of their cabin, he drags his siblings into the cold, rainy woods to search for the adults. The children pass out from exposure, and while Aldous and his brother survive, their sister dies. What follows is the heart-wrenching aftermath of responsibility and recovery. The parents, who live in a marijuana-induced fog, take no responsibility for their daughter's death. Aldous takes the blame and searches for answers everywhere: at school, in the Boy Scouts, at church. Telling the story through the eyes of a child is ambitious, but Briggs handles it delicately by displaying a unique balance between naïveté and wisdom. When Aldous reaches his 18th birthday, he commits the ultimate rejection of his parents' lifestyle: he enlists in the army. During training in Texas, he enters into his first relationship with a woman and begins to deal with his past. The chapters flip back and forth between Aldous the boy and Aldous the young man, with his childhood echoing his later life in complex and moving ways. The novel functions partly as a reflective critique of the counterculture lifestyle, but also as a hopeful coming-of-age story. Teens will relate to the protagonist as he takes those first steps into adulthood. Beautifully told and filled with characters of real depth and struggle, the story shouldn't be missed. Matthew L. Moffett, Ford's Theatre Society, Washington, DC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Laying out his larger themes without trickiness or pretension, Briggs pins them in place using vivid particularities. " -- Nisi Shawl, Seattle Times, October 21, 2005

"Laying out his larger themes without trickiness or pretension, Briggs pins them in place using vivid particularities. " --Nisi Shawl, Seattle Times, October 21, 2005

Customer Reviews

A stolen childhood
Early in "Shoot the Buffalo," a little girl dies due to parental neglect, but her brother blames himself. As a result, his childhood is also stolen from him. Without trustworthy parents to shelter him, Aldous searches for meaning in highly structured groups like the Boy Scouts and eventually, the Army. His story reminded me of the autobiographical struggles of author Tobias Woolf as told in "This Boy's Life" and "The Barracks Thief." In both cases the highly regimented, uniform-wearing organizations are just as stressful for the narrator as the bad parenting of earlier years. The spirit struggles to survive in unfriendly conditions. "Shoot the Buffalo" also made me think of another novel set in Washington state, Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping." That novel is also narrated by a child who has unconventional parenting and is haunted by the memory of a beloved sibling. Both Briggs and Robinson evoke the green, damp, forested Washington landscape and see it as a place of dread as well as a place of beauty. Briggs' writing explores physical and psychological landscapes with equal intensity.

This book is fantastic
What can you say about Matt Briggs? This book is fantastic. It reminds one of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Hansel and Gretyl. What happens in the woods? Does the little girl meet a wolf or an uncle? She doesn't meet a mother. Read this book to find out more.