This book is full of good information. The author provides aq very good level of step-by-step information about the entire construction process. Each section states it's objective, highlights relevant topics to consider, tells you how to accomplish each task, and provides examples. Includes explanations, progress/task checklists, cost estimating, and a sample project calendar and timetables usually missing from other books of this kind. It walks you through the whole process. This is the book I was looking for to build my house.

This is a terrific book for pregnant couples and new moms! I give it to all my friends when they have a baby.

It is wonderful for making your home safer for you and your child

This is NOT the worse novel that I have ever read! The symbolism and imagery bleeds out of this novel and the writing style makes the reading a challenge. However, the same way that Shakespeare's works are difficult to understand there is a reward when you discover the true meanings. When you read this book for the first time take it with a grain of salt and guess at the symbols your probably right. Reading is a personal experience and you can't be wrong if you can explain your view. Don't be discouraged, if I can do it, you too can catch the glory. When all else fails read the earlier edition from 1969 and peruse Grubes introduction, it's pratically Cole's notes.

I have recently read this book and I think it is quite interesting. But some what confusing. I have chosen to use it for a research paper in English. I was wondering if any one could direct me to any web sites or articles that review this book in more detail. I need some help in trying to write about and explain (to me) the function of various ideas that appear throughout the novel. Ie.The function of imagery, superstition, religion, the isolated village. Anything to do with the ideas of guilt shame, responsibility, birth and/or death. I need a place to start and some available literature to make reference to etc. Thank-you to anyone who can help.

I was dismayed by the negative reviews of Watson's fine experimental novel, The Double Hook (1959). Most of them came from high school students who were required to read a book when they didn't really want to read anything. Clearly some students are being given this book prematurely in Canada.

For someone willing to give the book a chance, I have some suggestions. It concerns a frightened group of people living at the edge of civilization, in British Columbian Cariboo country. A former population of Native Canadians has been displaced by settlers like them. Each character is haunted by the spectral presence of Coyote, a trickster figure revered by the former natives. Although Coyote is a symbolic presence, and feared as a curse by the whites, he brings redemption because his continuity means the destruction of native influence isn't complete, or even possible. That relates to the "double hook" of the title--literally a hook that points two ways, so that "you can't catch the glory on a hook and hold on to it. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear" (61, Kip's thoughts).

The book is written largely in dialogue without quotation marks. Modern writers like Joyce and Woolf experimented with varied presentations of fiction in the early 20th century, and Watson is playing with these techniques. Do not be dismayed by them, though. The book is presenting characters deeply fearful of what is happening around them. What they most fear is their ability to control their own existence. When Mrs. Potter dies, she becomes part of that fear (like Mrs. Moore in Forster's A Passage to India, who becomes part of the legends of the caves when she dies). Fire ends the influence of Mrs. Potter, and characters who have been alienated come into a better alignment with each other. Shrewdly, the narrator tells us, "Coyote plotting to catch the glory for himself is fooled and every day fools others" (61). Finally, a new child born is named "Felix" (Latin for "fortunate"). Here Christian redemption in a newborn babe blends with native beliefs, again hooking us doubly.

Failure in this book derives from an unwillingness to look at the alien and accept its presence and importance. When characters stop doing that, they create a place for themselves in the most inhospitable locale Watson ever found herself (as a teacher in the early 1930s). The book reflects her mental struggle to reconcile the bleakness of life in the Cariboo with her sense that the remote locales of Canada matter as much as the sophisticated soirees of Montréal and Toronto.

Finally, a book by William Faulkner--As I Lay Dying--greatly influenced this book's characters and style. Watson's book makes a good deal more sense if you read Faulkner's book first, or at least get a plot description of it.