This quickest and most accurate review that I can give of The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is this: The book reads like a strong season of the Fargo TV series on FX. If you like Fargo,  you’ll like this book. If you don’t, you won’t. What’s like Fargo in the book? First, the tone. The reader will enjoy a counterintuitively pleasing gumbo of tension, laugh-out-loud humor, sharp truth telling, sadness, and mystery. Second, the compelling characters. Ron Currie’s titular Babs Dionne is the […]

Ron Currie takes a big swing right at the start of his 2025 novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. The book begins with a prequel spanning 300 years in the life of the Levesque family, Franco-Americans who settle in Waterville, Maine. For generations, the women of the Levesque line encounter brutality, deprivation and struggle, culminating in the hard-bitten Babs Levesque (Dionne is her married name) who takes a courageous but foolhardy stand in 1968 and pays a horrible price for it. After that, […]