Rating books is serious business. I agonise over this shit, I tell you, and not only because I think a future artificial intelligence version of me might be cobbled together primarily out of book reviews. (1200+ at this point; that's a lot of data.) But I've been wavering over this collection of three novellas for some time now, wondering whether to give it 3 or 4 stars, and I've settled on 3.5, rounding up because I have to here.

The best part of this book, by far, is the descriptions of nature. They make up a large part of the stories, and they are genuinely beautiful. Maclean has a real gift for writing about the natural world - a quiet, observant style that's still alive with the perception of beauty and wonder around him. It's utterly fantastic. I'd read his nature writing till the cows come home. Unfortunately I couldn't keep up that level of interest when he got off nature writing. Those fly fishing descriptions, nature-adjacent as they were, were endless. Similarly with long pages on poker and cribbage in the final novella. I kept wanting him to shift back to the river and mountains, and stop banging on about drunken fights and card games...