... powerful ... The seven stories in Hunter’s Moon act as an unflinching reality check on the state of middle-age manhood at the close of the second decade of the 21st century ... Caputo’s wisdom runs deep. Few writers have better captured the emotional lives of men, their desperate yearning to improve them and their utter lack of tools or capacity to accomplish the task ... The publisher bills this collection as 'a novel in stories,' but the stories don’t combine, interweave and run together to form any sort of collective denouement. It’s not a novel. And that’s O.K. Just let them be stories and let us enjoy Caputo’s masterly telling ... [Caputo] all but begs his countrymen to ask for help and open up: Take care of one another, you bighearted lunks, you stubborn fools, you American men.
...captivating ... Hunter’s Moon is not an uplifting book. It is laced with tragedy and heartbreak. But what makes it so enticing, what makes you almost want to start it again as soon as you finish it, is the stellar writing and the captivating relationships Mr. Caputo creates among his characters, one of which is the rugged and beautiful Upper Peninsula ... additional kudos for [Caputo's] ability to write women who are not only believable and three-dimensional but influential and strong ... I almost re-read this book before writing this review.
... a skillfully wrought, often mesmerizing novel-in-stories ... Caputo excels at descriptions of nature, which his characters experience variously as sublime, indifferent or hostile. But his deeper subject is the vagaries of human nature, especially in the case of the male of the species. The wildness of Caputo’s woods — which teem with bears, wolves, icy rivers and other hazards — finds an analogy in the wilderness of the human soul ... It’s a familiar trope, to be sure. But these stories, written in a succinctly lyrical prose and punctuated by a sense of unease, still seem fresh and surprising.
Caputo knows something about combat and violence and the devastating toll it takes. The setting here is the vividly rendered Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but the battlefield nonetheless remains that of men’s souls ... The linked stories introduce a cast of memorable, three-dimensional, recurring characters, but it is the larger themes of love and sacrifice and the fraught bonds of male relationships that provide the real connective tissue. Caputo expertly crafts his psychologically astute narratives to explore how fathers and sons, combat veterans, and old high-school pals attempt to navigate their own subtly complex emotional terrain to find peace, forgiveness, and hope. As in every battle, some survive and some do not, but Caputo does suggest, at the end, that healing is possible.
... descriptions of northern Michigan, especially the beautiful Upper Peninsula, almost create stories of their own ... The characters, who Caputo draws so carefully, may not always see beyond themselves, but the reader is constantly aware of the immense grandeur of wildness and hints of a primordial world ... Seven stories connect exquisitely ... Each piece touches directly or indirectly on the effects of war on the soldiers --- those who return and those who did not go ... shows Philip Caputo’s understanding of tragedy and the events that are sometimes too much for the human soul. By weaving the Upper Peninsula landscape into the backdrop and the characters, his stories become vibrant and memorable.
Probing deeply into the male psyche, Caputo confidently tackles subjects that include the sometimes-catastrophic price of failure, the relations between fathers and sons, and the emotional battles faced by returning combat veterans ... While hunting figures prominently in most of the stories, even readers unfamiliar with that pursuit will find themselves immersed in Caputo’s fast-moving narratives. In vivid and minutely observant prose, he writes with assurance about his characters’ wilderness experiences and with equal sensitivity about the captivating natural beauty that surrounds them ... an intense, often unsettling journey into the male mind and heart ... Expertly blending plot and character, each of these taut, propulsive tales possesses novelistic depth.
... decent but repetitive ... Caputo’s men cloak vulnerability with callousness, but his plots replace emotional growth with the shocks of violence. This collection will appeal to readers looking for a dramatic take on masculinity, though the stories blend together by the end.
