An entertaining and thought-provoking examination of Western vigilante justice.
Debut author Liddycoat presents a shoot-’em-up cowboy tale, set in the lawless American West.
It’s 1885, and 17-year old Oregonian Jacob Scot, who recently received “a small fortune” as an inheritance from his grandparents, boards an eastbound train. He travels just 300 miles before the lush valley around Baker City catches his attention, and he steps off at the two-hour stopover to explore his surroundings. In his new city clothes, he appears “rich, young, and naïve—a prime target for the…predators in the booming town.” Criminal Hans Klause pushes him into an alley and Jess, Hans’ brother, stuns him with a blow to the head. But Jacob rallies, cracks Jess’s skull with an iron bar, and is about to hit Hans again when he hears the sheriff’s second warning: “Drop the bar or I will shoot you right here and now!” This is the first of many difficult situations that Jacob faces in this engaging, complex morality tale. The protagonist is repeatedly challenged to control his anger, which seems to consume him whenever he’s threatened. Soon “the Colonel,” a wealthy cattle rancher who observed the aforementioned fight, hires Jacob as a cowboy, and he’s placed under the tutelage of ranch hand Willem “Whitey” McKey, an experienced gunslinger. Jacob goes on to interact with numerous bad guys, and he meets a sex worker who wins his heart. Over the course of this book, Liddycoat creates extensive backstories for an assortment of characters, and he methodically explores how emotional pain and the desire for revenge can inspire men to make bad decisions. Straightforward, succinct prose (“Time froze. The needful something that rose in Jacob now wanted to kill….Jacob’s thumb reached to cock the gun”) and page-turning adventure will keep readers thoroughly engaged.
An entertaining and thought-provoking examination of Western vigilante justice.Pub Date: March 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62901-630-6
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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