Early Love and Brook Trout: With Watercolor paintings by the author

Early Love evokes a sense of almost trespassing through one of James Prosek's sketchbooks. This fourth book by the precociously prolific author-artist is quite personal, rife with exuberance about fishing and falling in love, and, not surprisingly, the angst that comes with failed relationships. As a writer, he matures with each new work; as a painter, he adds a layer of visual immediacy with his watercolors to his already descriptive prose. Prosek intended this to be a "little book" that would range "lightly over my years from nine to twenty-four, trying to open a window to my thoughts during that time as a river's surface occasionally does to its depths." Like a pool beneath the surface, it yields its trophies: a lovely anecdote about catching tiger trout with his sister; the unabashed first crush in his early teens that leads to a special fishing trip; his description of an old Canadian salmon guide as "a fiction of himself"; and passages like this:

Whitney and I bathed together early one morning in the wild Amonoosuc River.... The river was clear and cold, with big round boulders. Tiny brook trout, elusive as early love, darted at the foot of our naked bodies.

Your heart would have to be awfully hard to want to throw that one back. --Jeff Silverman