The Miramichi region of New Brunswick is famous for its fly fishing, which is why, in The Americans Are Coming by Herb Curtis (Goose Lane), so many Americans are buying up lakefront property to build fishing lodges. Despite the title, though, that’s not what this story is about. It’s about boys and men, mostly poor and undereducated, who live in a beautiful river valley and seek love and fulfillment in their own blundering ways. One learns to play the “guidar” and falls for the daughter of an American tourist; another learns the trumpet and falls in love while listening to jazz on the radio through a woman’s open window (it helps that the woman is undressing for a bath, her first one in several years); another makes enough money selling the fish he catches with his top-secret magnetized hook to move to Toronto with his boyfriend. Language is an important part of the story: most of the dialogue is in a backwoods dialect that sets the locals apart from outsiders and is the first thing that they try to lose when they venture outside the area. Don’t let the title fool you: the people in this book are superstitious, undisciplined, sometimes smelly, very funny and mostly not Americans.
