4 Stars. I listened to Connie Willis's collection of her own Christmas stories (A Lot Like Christmas) last year and went searching for more of her work. I stumbled on this anthology that she edited and decided to give it a try. The quality of the stories was remarkably consistent! The stories are arranged [...]
4 Stars. I'm not a huge fan of Westerns but this book caught my eye when a friend of a friend mentioned it on Facebook. I really enjoyed it. There's no denying the Western background but the themes of family, love, and loss are universal. I would actually recommend this for a book club. Jess's mother died in childbirth and Jess [...]
The Great Sachem of the Seneca tribe has lost his infant son. In grief, he joins an alliance of tribes in making war on other tribes and an English settlement. In the settlement, he finds a baby boy, only a few days old, who looks at him fearlessly even though the mother has just been killed. The Sachem decides that this brave boy will become his son, so he takes the child home and raises him to become the best fighter and the wisest man of his generation. His name is Renno. As the Seneca and the settlers encounter each other more and more over the years, it becomes apparent to both that their individual needs can best be met by an alliance. Who better to form the basis of that alliance than Renno, a man with ties to both worlds? Obvious thing first: the book wasn't very politically correct. Just look at the title: White Indian. What should it be? Caucasian Native American? I don't know. But that was the first thing to jump out at me. Overall though, I enjoyed the book. I liked the characters and the descriptions of their ways of life, both settlers and Native Americans. The pace was good overall, only occasionally getting bogged down in description. I could have used more dialog. The book was based more on description of action than dialog, and I really do like dialog more. Fans of westerns will like this one, even though it's not a true western (I think more of the settlers in California or New Mexico when I think of westerns). I'll keep reading the series. Reviewed October 14, 2008 Friday Flashback Reviews are a weekly feature here on The Introverted Reader. These are old reviews I wrote on GoodReads. Thanks to Angieville and…
Captains Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call have retired from active duty in the Texas Rangers and tried to settle in to life as ranchers. When an old buddy shows up talking about how beautiful Montana is and how much land is available for ranching, Captain Call is seized with the idea of being the first man to drive cattle up there. He gathers a crew and, along with Gus and a handful of loyal workers, takes off to cover the 3000 miles to Montana. I was blown away by how much I enjoyed this western. I've read a few of them, and even a few of McMurtry's other novels, but I didn't love any of them the way I loved this. It was just so epic in scale, it gave me a sense of how the "frontier" must have felt back in the day. And yet all these people wandered in and out of each other's lives in a way that is almost unbelievable. In a way it makes sense--there weren't many people, so surely they would all know each other--but the sheer distance makes it feel improbable. I guess I'll never know. It does make for good storytelling. The story switches back and forth between a lot of characters, which is occasionally a turnoff for me. It mostly worked in this book though. I never cared about Elmira one bit and couldn't wait to move on when I got to her sections, but even she served a purpose in the big scheme of things. I never had any trouble keeping track of who was who. Each character was so distinct that there was no danger of confusing anyone. Gus was hands-down my favorite character. I'll probably write a blog post about him alone one of these days. He had…
Monte Becket is a postman in Minnesota in 1915. In his spare time, he wrote a swash-buckling adventure that somehow becomes something of a bestseller. No one is more surprised than Monte. As these things do, the success goes to Monte’s head and he quits his day job to become a fulltime author. And he hits a wall. There’s nothing there. He has written all the stories he has in him in this one story. We first encounter Monte when he has been fighting this writer’s block for about five years. He is sitting at his window one day, trying to meet his daily quota of 1000 words, when he glimpses a boatman row into view through the fog. The boatman is rowing standing up and facing forward as he laughs to himself like he has a delightful little secret. Who could resist that particular allure? Monte runs outside and invites the boatman in for coffee. The man just keeps rowing and laughing, but responds, “Some other time.” Eventually, Monte and his wife and young son have the opportunity to become friends with the boatman, whose name is Glendon Hale. As they become closer to Glen, they feel certain that the man has a past he is hiding. One day, Glen confesses to Monte that he was married to a young Mexican girl a long time ago. He left her for reasons of his own, but now he feels like he should find Blue, as he affectionately calls her, and apologize for leaving her the way that he did. He invites Monte to accompany him on his search. Upon his wife’s urging, Monte eventually agrees to go with Glen, and their adventure begins. Okay, let’s just get it out there. This is not Peace Like a River. It’s just not.…
Take Rapunzel and plunk her down smack-dab in the middle of a Louis L'Amour book and you have the gist of this fun graphic novel. The framework of Rapunzel is here. Hungry mom, eager-to-please dad, evil witch, girl with crazy-long hair in a tower. But that's about where the similarities end. See, Rapunzel doesn't want a prince to come along and rescue her. Oh, no. She wants revenge. And she's perfectly capable of serving it up all by herself, thankyouverymuch. This was a lot of fun, and I can't give a real reason for knocking it back to three stars. Maybe it just veered a little too far away from the original? Or maybe Rapunzel was unrealistically self-sufficient? The girl was locked away in a tower for years, but she can kick some ass without even thinking about it. Now that I'm thinking about it more, it jumped around a little too much. Of course Rapunzel has lots of adventures, but there was nothing in between. It just jumped from castle to tower to town to ranch with very little transition. I think that's what bothered me the most. And Rapunzel's hayseed way of talking got a little old. There was a lot that I did like though. I liked that Rapunzel was a strong young woman. Her partner-in-revenge, Jack, was a charming rake. He doesn't think too much about stealing to get by, but Rapunzel knocks some morals into his head. I mostly loved the illustrations, although I never looked at them quite the same way after my husband asked me, in all seriousness, "Why is there a string of sausages on the cover of your book?" I liked that we got an explanation for the extraordinary length of Rapunzel's hair. I liked that Rapunzel's revenge wasn't just about…