A real treat for Western fans in need of a new fix.
Tuttle uses all the elements of classic Westerns and revenge stories in his debut novel about a Wyoming posse.
Residents of the frontier town of Snowy Point, Wyoming, are no strangers to hardship, and they’ve had their whole lives to get used to the inevitable challenges of the rugged mountains, harsh weather, and constant isolation. But they’ve also learned that when more human forms of trouble come to call, the only response is revenge. So when the bandit Klatchard “Klatch” Bordiaz and his band of outlaws attack the village, murdering, burning, and pillaging, the town’s citizens immediately form a posse to hunt the scoundrels down. The group includes the titular Kane Moss, a favored son of the mountain and an experienced traveler and fighter; Mountain Griz Bolem, so named for his immense strength and stature; Ellis “Cade” Junior and Jed Thompson, hunters with fearsome reputations; Zack Dawson, a miner and expert on gunpowder, and a good shot besides; and Sarah Jane Hawkins, strong and fierce enough that no one could object to having a woman as part of the team. All of them have lost someone or been somehow wronged in the raid, and the desire for vengeance burns deep. Still, with a long and twisted trail ahead of them and more than 30 enemies waiting at the end of it, the mountain warriors have their work cut out for them. Matters only get more complicated when Klatch hears of the pursuit, leaving the mountain posse with ambushes, false trails, and a long journey through hostile Native American territory to contend with. But death and hardship are no strangers on the frontier, and the fast-paced story is governed more by a sense of adventure than one of misery. Indeed, even the deaths of posse members don’t cause the other characters to pause for a while. There’s time for comedic interludes and even a burgeoning romance between Kane and Sarah Jane. Many of the characters don’t get much deeper than their basic descriptions, but they don’t entirely need to. There’s gunplay, long rides, bar fights, and bloody revenge. In short, everything a Western needs: no more, no less.
A real treat for Western fans in need of a new fix.Pub Date: July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-8379-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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