Eagles Fly Alone

In his first novel, Eagles Fly Alone, Lars Trodson has delivered a new world that is at once familiar and compelling. As with most great stories, plot is the least of it (To be clear, the plot is inventive, interesting, and enjoyable). Rather, it is the telling that draws the reader in and keeps him involved. Mr. Trodson gives us Fenton, NH, a town that those of us who grew up in New Hampshire identify with readily. At the same time, it is not the town we know from our youth. It is our town as it would be today, a combination of dogged Yankee tradition battling- sometimes winning, sometimes losing- the encroachment of the twenty-first century. We harken to the recognizable selectmen's meeting and the Halloween parade while recoiling from the attempt to locate a Dirty Books store in town and the dependence on tax revenue from a despoiling landfill.

It is in the characters he has created, though, that Lars Trodson's gift is most evident. From an almost-forgotten park ranger to an iconoclastic veteran to the Calhoun family, we are introduced to complete people. To not feel admiration, frustration, anger, compassion, and ultimately empathy for Langley Calhoun is not only impossible, it might just be inhuman.

Buy Eagles Fly Alone for a great story, but you'll remember it and look forward to more Langley Calhoun for a lot more.