Rich with period detail, an elegant, character-driven novel about the clash of cultures that forged the Lone Star spirit....
In a story as vast and action-packed as Texas itself, Vida (The End of Marriage, 2002, etc.) follows four strangers who join forces during the lawless years of early statehood.
During the early 1850s, despite rumors of Comanche attacks, settlers are pouring into the new state of Texas. Some, like Aurelia Ruíz, a Mexican widow who possesses healing powers, and Luck, a slave on the run from Tennessee, have no resources save their courage and wits. Others, such as 19-year-old Katrin, have put their faith in an Alsatian Jew named Henry Castro, who promises to build them a new city. Only Joseph, a Polish Jew from St. Louis, wants nothing from Texas except to settle his dead brother’s estate in San Antonio and move on. But when he stops to help the injured Luck, who in turn steals his horse, Joseph is stranded. To the rescue rides the caravan of Europeans led by Castro, en route to the land on which he intends to found Castroville. Resting with them before continuing his journey, Joseph learns that Comanche chief Ten Elk intends to kidnap Katrin. At Castro’s urging, Joseph consents to wed the young woman and take her away. Their wedding day is disrupted by the renegade Texas Rangers, who are losing their authority as government begins to be established in the state. With them is Luck, found sleeping near the Rangers, who intend to hang him. Joseph intervenes, thanking the troop’s suspicious captain for reuniting him with the slave he lost on the plains. Joseph, Katrin and Luck set off to homestead on their own, somewhere far from their enemies. The three become four when Joseph meets the beguiling Aurelia, who works in a shantytown kitchen making tortillas for soldiers.
Rich with period detail, an elegant, character-driven novel about the clash of cultures that forged the Lone Star spirit. Should be required reading in the contemporary immigration debate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56947-434-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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