SOURCE: Review of The Hermit's Story, by Rick Bass. Publishers Weekly 249, no. 21 (27 May 2002): 34.

In the following review, the critic maintains that The Hermit's Story, as a whole is uniformly excellent and that each story is both lovely and satisfying.

s Nature is as otherworldly as a line of bright birds frozen stiff, and as prosaic as a patch of grass, in this uniformly excellent collection. In the title story [of The Hermit's Story], a dog trainer and her companion, a man called Gray Owl, take six dogs out on a hunting exercise. Toward the end of their trip, Gray Owl falls through the ice of a lake, but instead of drowning, winds up on at the bottom of a dry basin covered with a layer of ice. He is joined by the trainer and the dogs, and together they cross the lake under the ice, an adventure that...