Excerpt from The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"The giant's getting closer," I whimpered.

Agnes rolled her eyes. "There's no such thing as—"

"HUSH!" Mama cried, rising from the rocking chair, and it bronco-bucked on the floor behind her.

The entire population of Bingham, Utah, lived in a deep, narrow canyon in the Oquirrh Mountains, and all of us—fifteen thousand bipedal moles in a massive nest—were stuffed down together, in the earth. Ramshackle wooden houses, tenements, and stores all piled on top of each other, lining both sides of the canyon walls, clear to the rim. The Kennecott Copper mine was at one end of the seven-mile-long canyon, and the only reason for Bingham's existence. The canyon itself was less than a city block wide, so every time a new house was built, it went to the end of the line like a naughty child, simply because there was no other place for it.

Father had come home for dinner that night, but he'd gone out again to play cards with his younger brother Johan, and their friends. Mama had begged him not to drink any of Johan's bootleg gin. She feared he'd go blind from the stuff, like Cotter Jones who lived two houses down from us. Father was no stranger to hooch, but he was also no Cotter Jones, who spent every waking moment of his life sucking at the teat of a dented tin flask he carried around in a hip pocket. Father was at least fully sober every Sunday, and rarely came home drunk from his card games, though his breath smelled like fermented pine from the juniper berries in the gin.

"Mama?" Agnes asked, now frightened herself. "What's wrong?"

"Everything's fine," Mama murmured, staring hard-eyed at the door, but even Agnes knew she was lying.


Until then, it had been just a normal day. Father got up for work early in the morning, same as always, at four A.M.—he worked a ten-hour shift in the copper mine, six days a week— and Mama got up, too, to make his breakfast. They spoke softly, trying not to wake my sisters and me, but they needn't have bothered. We never failed to hear everything.

"That's the last of the sugar," Mama said, pouring coffee in his thermos. "If you want more before Friday, we'll have to ask Fergus for credit."

Father was paid weekly. He gave his money to Mama and she ran the house. They bickered regularly over how little sugar she allowed him; she considered it a luxury, but Father had a sweet tooth and became irritable when none was left for his morning coffee.

"We're broke already?" His chair scraped on the wooden floor. "How come?"

Mama sighed. "Isaac needed new shoes. His toes were poking out of the old ones."

Before she became Mrs. Magnus Dahl, Mama's name was Hilda Gwozdek. Her folks and five ignorant, brooding siblings also lived in the canyon, but in the Highland Boy area with the rest of the Poles. Father always said Mama only married him to get away from her priggish mother and her short-tempered father, and there was at least a little truth to that: Mama undoubtedly loved Father for himself, but she loved him even more for not being a Gwozdek.

"That boy's growing too fast," Father said. I had my head under the covers, but I knew he was looking at me. "He needs new clothes every damn day."

"You want me to bind his feet like a Japanese girl? Make him stay small forever?"

"You betcha." Father's voice was a rumbling growl, but I didn't need to see his face to know he was smiling. "So long as there's sugar in my coffee."

"Agnes is growing out of her clothes, too, by the way."

"So? Just give her a potato sack and let her run barefoot."

Agnes could never tell when Father was joking. She huffed indignantly beside me in bed, and I elbowed her to keep her quiet; she huffed louder and elbowed me back.

"How come you get new clothes and I don't?" she hissed.

"It's a joke, dummy," I hissed back, rubbing my rib cage. "Oh."

"Go to sleep, the pair of you," Mama ordered.

Excerpted from The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates. Copyright © 2024 by Bart Yates. Excerpted by permission of A John Scognamiglio Book. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.