Backround info

In the book King of the Mild Frontier I couldn’t really find much of a plot. There are so many short stories that there is no one plot, there are several small plots. I really didn’t like the way he wrote it with that kind of plot. It was hard to follow the entire stories plot because the whole time you were just trying to figure out which plot that you should be following. This idea was also a good idea because; it was very helpful to follow each small plot. It was like an entire different novel within each chapter. Overall I think that the cons way out the pros and so I think that he should have had one plot that was easy to understand throughout the entire book in a much easier way instead of each chapter individually.

Because this book randomly travels through the life of a certain Chris Crutcher, there is no distinct setting throughout the book. The book King of the Mild Frontier takes place in entirely in Cascade Idaho, a small poor town with many weak athletics. The book revolves around his temper if anything, and he describes it differently in every one of his several short stories. Most are based somewhere in his school or at events for his school but there is the rare few that have nothing to do with the school. Some of the stories are based at his house and there are some that are based at the place of his employment. I think that the setting really changes the way that the story is told. If it had been placed in a big town like Boise or something like that there may have been some serious differences with his book. For one thing he would not have been on any sports team. The only reason that he made it on one in the first place was because everyone that went to his school automatically made it on a team. There also wouldn’t have been a bigger selection of things that he could try so that he wouldn’t have had to join C club and do the interesting tasks that they required Chris Crutcher to participate in, since he had gotten a letter. These are the basic things that the setting would have changed and since I am not a real big fan of this book I think that it would have been a better book if the setting of the book would have been placed in a bigger city so the changes would have occurred.

There are really only two characters really talked about in the book King of the Mild Frontier. There was Chris obviously since the book was an autobiography, and there was also his brother which was only talked about when he was trying to make Chris do something for his own personal game, and when it hurt Chris later either physically or mentally. Chris is the main character in this story. The entire book is based on his life and he is also the author of this novel. He goes from being only a boy of the age of two in one of his stories; to they have him at thirty four in one of the books about his at his current job. He appears to be a boy with good intentions every time until something goes terribly wrong or his temper takes over and he loses all of his control. In one of the stories he is entering a bicycle race to try and impress a girl. When he falls into dead last and the announcer is yelling at him to get off of the race track he raises his had in anger with only his middle finger in the air, and tells the announcer “Shut up you big fat shitburger”(King of the Mild Frontier Page 9) which surprised me quite a bit. The other character is the main antagonist in the story. Chris’s brother seems like the only thing he likes more that getting something for free, is taking that this from Chris and making Chris mad or miserable. He also will tell Chris lies when he does something wrong that makes Chris think that what he did was either good, or telling his parents would make it much worse. So the two main characters in this story are so different and so it makes the book exponentially better than it would have been with old boring characters.