In an aging, timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid, on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving off the wild after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration, or the medical bills they can't afford from their father's fatal illness, or the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is... different, more instinctual, deeply in tune with the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a dangerous proposition that will change both of their lives forever.
Raw ... Wink wants to move and excite the reader more than to educate or argue, and judged on those terms the novel is largely a success ... The novel is deliberately fast-paced from the beginning, made up of short unnumbered chapters, some less than a page long. This speed is exhilarating, but in the last quarter it also encourages an unfortunate kind of sketchiness.
