Trailer Park Tuesday: If Not For This by Pete Fromm

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

You've probably noticed the blog feed has been particularly full of books by Montanans this year.  There's a good reason for that: the Big Sky state has produced some exceptionally-fine literature for our shelves lately.  Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks, The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan, The Home Place by Carrie La Seur, High and Inside by Russell Rowland, and Tom Connor's Gift by David Allan Cates are all novels by Montanans which made their way onto my 2014 reading list.  Add If Not For This by Pete Fromm (author of As Cool As I Am) to that lineup--well, okay, I haven't read it yet....but I vow to do so before the year is out.  The lovely trailer for Fromm's latest novel certainly gets me in the mood to read this love story of two river rafters who are faced with some very hard challenges.  Here's the jacket copy synopsis:

After meeting at a boatman's bash on the Snake River, river runners Maddy and Dalt embark on a lifelong love affair. They marry on the banks of the Buffalo Fork, sure they'll live there the rest of their days. Forced by the economics of tourism to leave Wyoming, they start a new adventure, opening their own river business in Ashland, Oregon: Halfmoon Whitewater. They prosper there, leading rafting trips and guiding fishermen into the wilds of Mongolia and Russia. But when Maddy, laid low by dizzy spells, with a mono that isn't quite mono, both discovers she is pregnant and is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, they realize their adventure is just beginning. Navigating hazards that dwarf any of the rapids they've faced together, Maddy narrates her life with Dalt the way she lives it: undaunted, courageous, in the present tense. Driven by her irresistible voice, full of wit and humor and defiance, If Not For This is a love story like no other.

The video, produced by the good folks at StraightEIGHT Films, moves gracefully, sensuously--like the deliberate current of a river (with one cutaway to whitewater rapids, which hints at the turmoil of Maddy's condition)--and ends with a series of blurbs, like this one from Ron Carlson: “In If Not For This, Pete Fromm brings us a rich, deeply felt book, so full of kindness and kind people that it’s an absolute phenomenon.”  To paraphrase Maddy, I can hardly wait to launch into this book and get swept downstream.