Ice-Out

Gr 9 Up—Owen Jensen, 19, longs to break away from his family's creamery business and start his own auto dealership in 1920s rural Ranier, MN. After his father unexpectedly dies, Owen, as the eldest of six brothers, gets dragged further into the responsibilities of the creamery and yearns for a life that would have included his sweetheart Sadie Rose, now off to college in St. Paul. Despite his father's previous warnings, the protagonist is pressed into accepting the loan he requested from local bootlegger Mr. Pengler to buy a fleet of Studebakers. He becomes indebted to Pengler and agrees to join a bootleg run in return. But icy conditions in the lake-filled U.S.-Canadian border village conspire against him and pull him further into illegal alcohol smuggling, with ultimately tragic results. Owen appeared as a secondary character in Casanova's Frozen but takes center stage here. While other characters from the earlier novel also appear, this volume can easily stand on its own. The plot seems uneven at times, but this title works best as an illustration of daily life during Prohibition and the conflicts of this period.