I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

Read: November 2025
Format: eBook

It felt really good to start reading I Cheerfully Refuse after two fantasy books in a row! Speculative and character-driven literary fiction feels more like my home turf, and dystopic vision for this world is (for better or for worse) very much my vibe!

I don’t normally bother to include a plot summary – because you can look that up very easily yourself if you are interested – but, in this case, I’d like to give the publishers credit for a very succinct, accurate blurb –

Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.

A Future America, on Lake Superior

There is an awful lot that I loved about this book, it is very much my vibe!

The setting of Lake Superior (in North America) was fantastic. It’s a powerful natural force, it is unpredictable and saves Rainy at times, but at others it puts him in danger’s path. It’s a vast no-man’s land between the US and Canada, and yet it is an enclosed lake and not an ocean that might allow true escape. I have never been to that part of the world, so I don’t know any of the real-world places, but it did get me interested enough that I was on Google Maps trying to track Rainy’s journey! I don’t think every town is real, but a lot of them are. I think some places are renamed.

It also had me looking up whether it was true that long frozen corpses float up from the bottom of the lake on occasion… and apparently they do!

This setting had me in mind of similar remote and struggling waterside towns from other dystopian media. In particular, the Cold Harbour DLC for Fallout 4, and Mrs Selvig’s home town in season 2 of Severance.

That is very much the vibe of this book. This future America has been through multiple pandemics that have decimated the population, and there are regular extreme weather events. Society as we know it now has collapsed; there is a form of government, but it functionally exists only for the very wealthy – the 16 families control the entire economy, news, satellites, mineral rights, clean water and shipping (‘astronauts’ as they are colloquially known). The remaining population live in a perpetual survival mode, barter for goods, indentured labour is back in style, and the vast majority of people are illiterate… including the president.

The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went.

Children get rated on the ‘Feral Comportment Continuum’ and the class that Rainy teaches music to ‘had received in utero chemical violations that rendered them impervious to reality.’ There is also a new designer drug known as ‘Willow’ that is sweeping in popularity as it allows people (entire families) to check out of this life in the hope of reaching a better one (this reminds me of Fallout’s Plan D).

Willow was named for the sensation it was said to evoke of climbing through alpine tundra toward whatever comes after.

Other pharmaceutical research goes into methods to treat workers and prisoners with ‘Compliance and Conclusion’ therapies to make them more obedient (I’m playing The Outer Worlds 2 at the moment, where one of the factions practices “mental refreshment”).

It also sounds pretty bleak, right? And a little bit too close to a possible reality.

Good people and scared people

There is some hope in the story carried by its amiable protagonist. Rainy is a simple man; he is kind and compassionate, and he always wants to see the best in other people. At the start of the book, he has a happy little life with Lark, the love of his life (and his motivation to teach himself to read), and a friendly little community. He gets work painting houses, he plays in a local band, he teaches music to local children, and he works on restoring his neighbour’s old boat. He has people that he cares about and that care about him.

 In a grade-school Robin Hood play I was Little John. What a good role. I took to it naturally and suppose I never really stopped. 

Lark was a public librarian before the libraries were shut down, and now owns an illicit bookshop inside a bakery. She is passionate about her work and hunting down new “caches” of books, and has an even greater open heart than Rainy. She is the one who brings home Kellan, an escaped indentured worker/test subject from one of the “medicine ships” that float on Lake Superior. Kellan is a peculiar young man with a “kid brother energy” that makes Rainy want to take him under his wing and help him; unfortunately, he is also the catalyst for the events that take over the novel.

Her bookshop, Bread, was a success, but dealing in adventurous verse and unapproved literature got it targeted as the merry purveyor of rebellion it unquestionably was.

Inevitably, Rainy must leave his former life and set out onto the Lake. From this point, the plot is a series of events and run-ins that he has with various towns and the strange folk that populate the lake’s edge. He finds dying towns gripped by despair, personal fiefdoms run by violent gang leaders, and turf wars between rival communities. The people are strange, scared, angry, and unpredictable. One particularly odious character (child sex trafficking heavily implied but not described in detail), King Richard, has a giant cross made out of machine guns.

There is a villain figure in this book, Werryck. He is the driver behind Rainy’s misfortunes, but he is just as much of a tragic figure as everybody else. He’s a sick old man who has, by all accounts, not slept in seventeen years, and he has a growing tumour-like lump on his neck. He works for the pharmaceutical company and manages the “medicine ship,” and that means he’s stuck out on the lake, living in a miserable and crumbling old vessel just like everybody else. We don’t know the cause of his lack of sleep or the lump on his neck, but given his job and the number of people we learn about that are sick because of working with toxic materials, it doesn’t seem unlikely that he’s another type of victim of the system. We know he liked Lark and Rainy; coming after them was motivated by managerial pressure (it would be very bad for him not to recover what was lost), not any malice.

There is one functional community, though, and this is where the hope lies. Rainy finds one town where the people are kind and open-hearted, and even have books. He clings to this as his beacon; if he can survive all the other bullshit, then that the town is his future, his place of safety. Though Rainy himself is no revolutionary, others are working against the systems of exploitation and cruelty, and he encounters them later in the book. They offer some hope that things could get better again, just as long as people can trust each other and work together.

Meandering

My criticisms of this book, and why it is only 4 stars instead of 5, are that because things happen to Rainy, rather than him being on his own quest, the pacing was uneven, and there is often no sense of urgency (until there is). The middle meanders a lot, and I also found the end section – when he ends up on the ship – to be very slow. If you are a reader who prefers plot over character-driven and contemplative stories, then you probably won’t enjoy this.

This is the first book I’ve read by Lief Enger, and I found it beautifully crafted, so I will definitely be on the lookout to read more from him.

I heard about this one in a Plant Based Bride video. I’ve found that channel fairly recently, and have been picking up a few recommendations from Elizabeth because we appear to have similar tastes. This one was definitely a success, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck into more that I’ve heard about from her reviews.