Book: Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore


Funny novel about an insurance salesman and a trickster god

Christopher Moore
Coyote Blue
Harper Collins, 2003 (originally published 1995)
ISBN: 0-380-72523-1
$13.00
303 pages

In Coyote Blue, Sam Hunter is a successful insurance salesman in Santa Barbara; he drives a Mercedes and lives in a tony apartment. But he was born Samson Hunts Alone on the Crow reservation in Montana. Before he left there, his nutty uncle Pokey claimed that Samson had had a vision of Coyote, the Crow trickster god. And now it seems that Coyote has come to Santa Barbara. Of course, Sam's tidy but uninspiring life isn't going to stay the same after a close encounter with a trickster god.

The characters in Coyote Blue are interesting, varied, and mostly funny, and the story is consistently interesting. Of course, it shouldn't be difficult for an author to keep a plot moving in interesting directions if one of the main characters is a trickster god. Still, it doesn't often feel as though Mr Moore is cheating.

Some of the ending is a bit trite, but since Coyote Blue is one of those few books that I've had to put down because I was laughing too hard to continue to read, I have to say that I liked it a lot.

There's a tiny error when a Japanese man refers to "the Zen garden at Kyoto" (p. 154). There are lots of those there.

Posted: Thu - January 6, 2005 at 08:02   Main   Category: 

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