Review of Northern Umbrage

[Abigail Stucker]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Northern Umbrage" by Dennis Lorenz Ph.D..]

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3 out of 5 stars

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Northern Umbrage is the story of a post-doctoral scientist named Buc, who begins the book by saving 2 girls. The story forgets about this plot point, except for one slight mention later on. Buc finds a new assignment in a small Wisconsin town in which all of the fish are dying. His job is to figure out what is happening to them. Right away when he gets there, he gets sidetracked and starts looking into this beast that the townspeople speak of. He finds a drawing from an old dude in a nursing home who acts very oddly but we never get a follow-up or explanation as far as that piece, only that he is very scared of the beast. Buc takes the drawing to Sadie, a local who runs a museum to see if she knows anything about the beast.
Sadie doesn't know anything. The beast is incredibly malformed, but she wants to help him in his search. They get closer as their search goes on, but Buc keeps searching for this beast and I keep thinking what does this have to do with the fish? For a scientist, he is just going on a wild path to follow some dude from the nursing home picture.
Buc is intelligent when it comes to science and natural pathology, but I found him to not have very much common sense. He got himself in a lot of trouble many times and I was super confused as to why he even was able to get into some of the situations. At one point he goes out into a superfreeze where the roads are completely shut down because it's so cold to collect mud samples and almost gets himself killed. Unless the author was trying to portray a book-smart but not a street-smart character, I was so confused.
I did end up laughing at parts of this book and found some of the plotlines interesting, however, sometimes I was lost.

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Northern Umbrage
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