The new Lief Enger was a weird one for me. I really liked it – it has major Station Eleven vibes – but it got weird! Basically we are plopped right down in the middle of the story, decades after some sort of climate disaster decimated society as we know it. Rainy, our hero, is married to Lark and Lark is a lover of all things literature. She’s built up this sort of library/bookstore and the whole first part was so lovely and good. And then stuff happens, of course! And Rainy is set off on this perilous journey that takes him away from the life he had known and plummets him into a world of danger. 3.75 stars for this one!

A tender post-apocalyptic tale, with a very literary style. Enger's strength is in his characters, although he's guilty of perhaps overworking some of his minor characters. Rainy's story is bittersweet, and Enger creates an emotional journey through heartbreak, grief and hope. I enjoyed large parts of this novel: it had me feeling joyful and angry in all the right places. My main gripe in the tonal shift in the final third of the book. i wish the story had come to it's conclusion in a different way. The climactic events felt out of place compared to the rest of Rainy's journey, straying into more cliched post-apocalyptic territory. Overall, a recommended read.

I loved this book. It gives the same feeling as Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. There were countless quotes that I will wish to reread over and over. Will definitely be recommending this frequently. Very well done. 4.5/5 stars rounding up to 5.

If anything, I Cheerfully Refuse is first and foremost, an exhibition of penmanship, and a story second. Leif Enger’s writing flowed with complexity and enthusiasm, which helped paint a vivid and lively American scenery detached from its semi-dystopian reality. In her kindhearted and, might I say, bimbo protagonist Rainy’s point of view, nature is not only abundant but also very much alive. Here, instead of a rushing tone, Rainy observed his surroundings with a mix of tenderness, worry, and appreciation, despite the harsh conditions of his voyage and the threats that prompted it.

Yet again, Lief Enger brings readers into the company of a kind and peace-seeking central character, the type of person you come to know so well in the story that feel a loss when the book ends. This time, that character is a man named Rainy who, like Odysseus, sails on a boat to make his way back to his wife (at least spiritually) after bad times. Along the way, he confronts the most vicious forms of evil, rescues a child, and of course, like every leading character in an Enger book, makes lots of good friends while modestly demonstrating that good wins out in the end. His quest is both dangerous and romantic, making this a fast and fascinating read.

There were times when I found this story so chaotic and confusing without fully understanding what had happened. I kept wondering how things got to be the way they were, wondering who these “astronauts”, the people in charge were, these truly evil people. Maybe the chaos and confusion was meant to reflect the apocalyptic nature of the time, maybe Enger is trying to warn us about evil focrces that are around us today. I’m really not sure. It’s unnerving, to say the least.

However, there’s much to love about this dystopian novel, especially some of the characters. Rainy, a bear of a man with such a gentle heart, expressing so much with his music. It’s moving to see how compassionate he is with children, how he protects and saves 9 year old girl named Sol from a life of abuse on multiple occasions. I love his wife Lark, too, her love of books, how everyone loves her, how Rainy became a reader because of her. Lark exudes such hope in spite of what is happening. Sol is a bright spot in keeping with her name and gives Rainy some much needed hope in his grief.

The presence of the future through a dream, perhaps the spiritual moment of connection Rainy was searching for, the beauty and lure of his music, of the written word, of natural occurrences and the courage and resilience of people under duress, do bring hope. These things outweigh what at times left me wondering . This is worth reading for the memorable characters and the writing which is as lovely as in his other novels. PEACE LIKE A RIVER , though, which is one of my favorite books remains my favorite by Leif Enger.

I was grateful to have read this with my book buddy , Diane.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher through both NetGalley.

While some may find its earnestness cloying, Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse is an absorbing adventure novel with a fully realized setting and a wholehearted embrace of hope.

Set around Lake Superior in the Upper Midwest, I Cheerfully Refuse depicts a near-future America that has collapsed to the point where it more closely resembles the past. The coasts are the domain of the all-powerful trillionaire ruling class, known as "astronauts" for how untouchable they are to the common man. The rest of the country has been ravaged by climate disaster, widespread illiteracy, and exploitative capitalism. Highways are ill-maintained and plagued by bandits; the internet is functionally non-existent; the waters of Lake Superior are populated by scrawny mutant fish. Our protagonist, a gentle giant of a man named Rainy, still has plenty to live for: playing bass at the local bar, steaming cups of coffee, his saintly book-collecting wife Lark. Others aren't so lucky, and go in search of something better with a popular euthanasia drug called "Willow."

The first part of the novel, which establishes this milieu of cozy desperation, is the strongest. Rainy and Lark may be happy despite everything, but Enger takes pains to illustrate just what "despite everything" means. He fills in the margins with tart, George Saunders-esque satire of late capitalism, including a proudly illiterate president and a law called "the Employers Are Heroes Act" that essentially legalizes indentured servitude. He relates Lark's efforts to save as much literature as she can with admiration, but never lets us forget the pigheaded devaluation of the arts that made such an undertaking necessary to begin with. When one of Rainy's best friends takes a tab of Willow and calmly waits for death, Enger writes with nothing but empathy for an ailing man who sees a world "running out of everything, especially future." "Doing the dishes [before taking Willow] was so pleasant I almost changed my mind," says Rainy's friend. But he doesn't, and it's easy to understand why.

As effective as the scene-setting is, it's still only a quarter of the novel. After Lark is murdered in a home invasion, Rainy embarks upon a sailboat journey to the Slate Islands of Lake Superior, both to escape the dangerous men who killed her and to seek a kind of spiritual reunion with her at a place that was special to them. Along the way, he forms a cat-and-mouse dynamic with one of his pursuers, is beset by storms and gales, and forges an unlikely friendship with a headstrong young girl escaping her abusive guardian. His journey is filled with striking, memorable details and setpieces, captured with imagination and verve by Enger: a sinister character who owns a cross made of "two automatic rifles," a forsaken island whose populace paints murals of their dead, and a harrowing stealth mission to circumvent a tyrannical toll booth operator.

I Cheerfully Refuse, as its title suggests, is a book intended as a missive against the status quo, which is to say a missive against hopelessness. In response to those who say Willow takers are going "in search of someplace better," Rainy recalls Lark saying that "better is right here" if only people would stay and make it so. This is essentially the novel's thesis, and it's a point Enger makes again and again in the story's last third, all the way up to an ending that will strike some as too tidy. More cynical readers may find Enger's pleas against despair as effective as a "Hang In There" poster on a cubicle wall. But he writes with such sincere affection for this setting and these characters that it's hard to begrudge him his sentimentality. After all, if a reader wants detached pessimism, they can find it virtually everywhere else.

Enger’s Peace Like a River is one of my favorite books and this new story further encompasses why. His writing style and language are delightful. He can weave a tale with vivid imagery and a well-developed cast of characters unmatched by most authors. This was such a unique futuristic story without all the sci-fi or apocalyptic tropes. It caused me to sit back and reflect and pull apart the events and feelings of the characters. I highly recommend this book, and also suggest checking out Peace Like a River when you’re finished!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

Leif Enger's mastery of sentences makes his prose a beautiful joy to read and his books ones to linger over.

"My own version of romance not to say magical thinking lets me down routinely."

The book is a love story set in an apocalypse, but not like any other I've read. Our main character spends a significant time on a boat out on Lake Superior in its futuristic, monstrous state. With nods to epic travel stories, this one is still new and fresh. I cried over the fate of these characters but cheered for their hope against all odds. As always, Enger earns a spot on my keeper bookshelf.

I LOVED this book! What I thought would be a quirky, unassuming little yarn ended up being one of the most moving and insightful contemporary novels I've read in a while. The book is a meditation on grief, capitalism, climate change, found family, and hope--and if that all sounds heavy and self-serious, it's also funny and weird and beautifully readable. I wanted to live in this book for hundreds more pages, which is really saying something since the world it depicts is frightening (and frighteningly recognizable). Will definitely be buying this for friends and family.

A beautifully written novel of a dystopian landscape in the near future. In turns heart breaking, action packed, and food for the soul. A very enjoyable read. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Enger presents a dystopian novel set in the future where climate change has wrecked havoc with earth. In a small area, near Lake Superior, a few people have managed to maintain a life away from the evil that has penetrated the world. However, that is not to last. I found the writing remarkable and soothing as I read even though the content reminded me a bit of Gulliver's Travels. Our storyteller, Lark, embarks on an odyssey to find something--happiness, peace, who can tell...

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger is a hope-filled adventure tale set in the not-too-distant future on and along the shores of Lake Superior. The novel is Odysseus meets Orpheus mixed with a touch of Treasure Island in an increasingly illiterate society where a small ruling class makes and enforces all rules with cruelty and vengeance. Enger is best known for his character-driven, poetic novel Peace Like a River and his other tender novels set in the upper Midwest. This is his first foray into apocalyptic fiction, where he retains the beauty of the luminous descriptions and strong characters we love from his earlier books.

Lark is a used bookseller who buys and loves books in a world that both bans and burns them. Her husband Rainy, who’s madly in love with her, is a bass player who shows the reader the healing power of music. They take in Kellan, an escaped indentured servant (yes, indentured servitude has returned to the U. S.), who arrives at Lark’s shop with an advance copy of a mid-20th century unpublished manuscript, I Cheerfully Refuse, by her favorite poet/essayist. The foreshadowing in that title lets us know that these characters won’t readily give up what they consider essential.

The first third of the book sets up the new world order and the incandescent landscape Lark and Rainy inhabit. Soon oligarchs and their followers, searching for what they believe Kellen has stolen, kill Lark, so Rainy flees into Lake Superior on an ancient sailboat with an unstable motor. This is where the book veers and Lake Superior becomes what Enger agrees is “the beating heart of the book.” Rainy’s journey there mirrors the coming of the Tashi Comet as he, a kind and virtuous character, begins to thaw from his frozen state of grief on the unpredictable waters of the inland sea when he rescues Sol, a ten-year-old girl also escaping demons, and he further endangers himself. Like Orpheus, Rainy and Sol travel through a frightening underworld chased by an evil villain as Rainy uses his music to overpower that evil. Their travails also mirror those in Treasure Island with its inebriated cast, elusive treasure, and mutineers.

The novel celebrates the transformative power of learning to love and care for another and the importance of being true to oneself. This sailing adventure attacks the consequences of climate change and the threat of absolute rulers and their intoxicating temptations. Rainey sums up his music with its power to calm even the most horrible and powerful in this musing: “Eventually, I came down on the bedrock of an old American hymn. An earnest chant from before my time, when the church was briefly other than an instrument of war. I liked it for its clarity and yearning, its warm dawn of a chorus.” Then he observes, “What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.”

Summing it Up: Read this hopeful sailing adventure with its conniving characters chasing the kind, courageous people who are fighting against what seems to be an impenetrable controlling class. Stick with the beginning of the book as it builds the new world, then soar with speed under a heavy wind when Rainy sets sail to save himself and rescue Sol. Ron Charles of The Washington Post calls it “the sweetest apocalyptic novel yet” and “an alluring itinerary toward hope.” I agree.

I recently read Leif Enger’s “Virgil Wander” after having had it on my TBR list for years. I really enjoyed it so I thought I’d try another one of his excepting it to be the same type of tone and genre. I was proven wrong. I Cheerfully Refuse is a dystopian novel. Not at all what I expected!

Society is teetering on the edge of a precipice in this novel. Climate change has had some brutal consequences, pandemics have culled the population, schools are closed, illiteracy runs rampant, money is sparce so there is a lot of bartering, and chemical suicide is thought of as a step up.

After his wife is murdered, Rainy, escapes on a boat he had been rebuilding to the depths of Lake Superior. He dodges storms, floating bodies, and the people trying to catch him. His destination is a place called the Slates where he hopes to meet up with his dead wife (you have to read it to understand). I’ll stop before I give anything away.

Though the book is full of dark topics the overall feel is not. Mind you, it is not a light and fluffy read either. It is an interesting, and almost sweet, apocalyptic tale and definitely worth the read!

Leif Enger’s prior novel, Peace Like A River, was a wonderfully engrossing novel so I was anxious to read his newest book, I Cheerfully Refuse. The story is about an undesirable future world that is dangerous and unpredictable. I was a bit disappointed. It was difficult for me to stay invested in the story. It took me a while to finally finish reading it. It was just ok for me.

I kept expecting a more in your face apocalypse story but instead got a simmering tragedy that managed to keep an uplifting tone. This may need a reread to fully grasp the poignancy of Rainy's story. It was quite an adventure despite bad turns and I do think the writing is top notch.

„Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone‘s mind.“

So begins this beautifully written, haunting novel set in a not-so-distant dystopian future where it does indeed feel like the end is near. Musician Rainy and his bookseller wife Lark live on the edge of Lake Superior, enjoying a simple but comfortable life in a deteriorating world and society. When they take in a boarder, their lives inevitably turn into tragedy, and soon Rainy, grieving and hunted, sets sail across the Lake both to escape his pursuers and in hopes of finding his lost love. What follows is a mesmerizing tale of Rainy‘s odyssey across Lake Superior - its moods, set off by extremes in climate, turning the Lake into its own character. At times action-filled and nail-biting in its suspense, the novel ebbs and flows between driving the story forward and quiet, reflective moments which make it all the more beautiful.

Rainy muses: “I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.“

Filled with the kindness of strangers, greed, the immeasurable worth of books, adventure, connection, ignorance and hatred - both the very worst and the very best humanity has to offer -, and the resilience and perseverance of the human spirit, „I Cheerfully Refuse“ is a testament to finding beauty in any circumstance and, ultimately, a poetic, thoughtful tale of hope. A literary triumph.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

„I Cheerfully Refuse“ is set to be published on April 2, 2004.

This was my first Leif Enger book. Excellently paced. Likeable characters. Definitely a book that you want to discuss.
Recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley for the chance to preview this book!

Note: This review will be live on my website at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time April 4, 2024.

The most effective post-apocalyptic fiction and climate fiction (cli-fi) doesn’t feature One Big Disaster that annihilates half the population and resources of the Earth with a Galactus-like snap. These stories are more like mid-apocalypse, and so more realistic, and maybe more existentially frightening. It’s difficult to imagine Mount Hood actually erupting and spilling lava down the Columbia Gorge and taking out Portland, Oregon, where I live, but it’s a possibility. (According to the New Yorker article about this possibility, it’s not worth my worrying about how I will survive in this post-apocalyptic, post-eruption future. I will be immediately choked by smoke then smothered in hot lava.) It’s such a remote possibility, this Galactus-snap apocalypse, that it’s thrilling to read about or to watch on the big screen.

In more literary post-apocalyptic novels, the crisis—or more often crises—are ongoing to the extent that it’s pointless to wonder when things will “go back to normal.” These stories—I’m thinking of works like Joy Williams’s Harrow—are set in the slow-rolling middle of the apocalypse, where something has happened, but things are still kind of happening, so this is the way things are for now, and it may change tomorrow, and it may not, and there’s no way to know, so you might as well play bass in the local band and run a hybrid bakery/bookshop in a postliterate world.

This is what the main characters of I Cheerfully Refuse are doing in the opening chapters of the latest novel Leif Enger. The narrator, Rainy—short for Rainier, like the mountain near Seattle—is doing his best to maintain a small life in a small midwestern town in this otherwise miserable post-apocalyptic world. His partner, Lark, runs the bookshop half of the bakery. In addition to the bakery and the bass-playing, Lark and Rainy take in boarders. When a skittish young man named Kellan arrives in search of a place to stay, Rainy takes him under his wing like the little brother he never had. Kellan is one of the many workers in the United States signed on to a six-year indentured-servant-like contracts that they cannot break, and they may not leave the prisonlike confines where they are forced to live. The occasional escapees are known as “squelettes,” for the emaciated appearance of the first escapees to make it to French-speaking Canada. And who are they running from, these squelettes? The astronauts, of course. That’s what members of the ownership class are called, a nod to the off-planet ambitions of our current crop of mega-billionaires. As a squelette, Kellan is a fugitive, which puts Rainy and Lark in legal danger. But Kellan seems harmless enough, despite his paranoia and night terrors. Everyone is dealing with the mid-apocalypse era in their own way.

Anyone who is having even half a decent time of it thinks of themselves as lucky, including the narrator Rainy. Everything around them crumbles into neglect. An expressway sags into the ditches on either side after three flash floods in quick succession wiped out a section of pavement. Residents requested repairs, which were promised as soon as funds were allocated, but no repair was ever made. It’s a microcosm of what’s happened to the rest of the world in this novel: a series of never-ending disasters, large and small, that overwhelmed infrastructure and budgets and organizational capacities. As Rainy puts it: “The world was confused. It was running out of everything, especially future.”
Just when it seems that the apocalyptic conditions, both environmental and societal, are going to be the amorphous but oppressive evil against which the protagonists fight, an actual, flesh-and-blood human antagonist arrives on the scene: Werryck. He’s in pharmaceuticals, and he will absolutely destroy anything and anyone in his way of controlling supply and labor. Kellan warns Rainy about “relentless hellhound” Werryck: “When you see him standing in your kitchen, you slip out the back. Be quiet, be quick. Don’t hunt for your wallet. Don’t grab a coat. Slip out the window if you have to.”

The appearance of the menacing Werryck changes everything and sets in motion a slow-motion chase on Lake Superior with many stops for supplies that might bring to mind The Odyssey, or even The Little Prince. Safe harbors are hard to come by, but a small found family congeals around the rickety Flower, piloted by Rainy. Environmental and community devastation are evident throughout: long-dead bodies released from the lake’s depths by climate change, the extortion of a bridge lift operator, the nearly empty lakeshore towns.

And what of the title? Does it refer to a ragtag band of resistance fighters against the astronauts? Is Rainy a Bartelby-esque thorn in the side of capitalism? It’s none of these. It’s actually the title of Lark’s favorite book, written by the fictional author Molly Thorn. The book was never published, but Lark has come into possession of a rare advanced review copy, or ARC, printed before the publication was canceled. As an aside, this created yet another a surreal moment for me as a reviewer, as I was reading an ARC of a novel called I Cheerfully Refuse.

I know I said that literature that uses the slow-rolling middle of an apocalypse feels more realistic, but I Cheerfully Refuse does have a surreal dreaminess about it, even outside the occasional dream sequence or reference to an advance review copy. The twists and turns of the plot are earned; there is no deus ex machina feel. But the eerie calmness of Sol, the girl Rainy takes aboard his boat, and the pettiness of the bridge operators, and the memory of sailing to the Slates with Lark are just one step beyond grounded. Oddly, that in turn makes the setting a little more believable. If it were merely gritty realism, not only would the novel be a downer, it would be kind of unbelievable to a reader in 2024. In the past several years, we have been required to adjust to the very weird: heat domes, record-setting wildfires, a global pandemic, reality TV stars as world leaders, and phrases like “milkshake duck,” “This is fine,” and “covfefe” breaking free of social media and coming out of our actual mouths in conversation. A near-ish-future post-apocalyptic cli-fi novel that is not at least a little surreal would not be at all realistic. Which is surreal in itself.

Despite its surreality and erosion of community and climate, I Cheerfully Refuse lives up to its title in offering quiet resistance in the form of solidarity and community. Rainy eventually “remembers the future,” as he says, and the very idea of looking forward to small pleasures and contentment. This undercurrent might shift the novel toward another new subgenre, hopepunk. There are no Marvel superheroes or Katniss Everdeens here, but there are regular people making music and bread and bookshops and friendships amid the chaos.

I had high hope for I Cheerfully Refuse. It started out so promising, but then petered out in the second half.

The writing was lovely in its own way, descriptive and profound. The love story between Rainy and his wife, the dive into their life together was sweet. The idea of this dystopian future where reading and literacy are considered unimportant or even undesireable is the scariest thing a bookstagrammer could imagine. The sense of hopelessness that pervades the society, such that a suicide drug is seen as an acceptable option, elevated to almost a religious experience, was strangely enticing. All of these themes made for an exceptional read. And I rather liked that it was never specified how society ended up in this position.

Unfortunately, it just couldn't hold my interest as well when it started to focus on the little girl, Sol, and the evil corporations taking advantage of the less fortunate among the population.

I guess the book just felt more intimate in the beginning, but lost that feeling as it progressed.