Set in Michigan’s wild, starkly beautiful Upper Peninsula, a cast of recurring characters move into and out of each other’s lives, building friendships, facing loss, confronting violence, trying to bury the past or seeking to unearth it.
... 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.
