A straight-shooting, old-fashioned horse opera.
A hard-bitten tale of sacrifice in the Wild West.
The spirit of old John Wayne movies is alive and well in this rough-and-tumble western. Denmon takes all the conventions inherent in the traditional horse opera and manages to flesh out a plausible, articulate action novel with a brisk, satisfying pace. The book is set during the last bloody gasp of the Old West, during the early years of the 1900s. Pancho Villa and his minions both terrify and inspire the peasants of northern Mexico as the revolution threatens to devolve into civil war. Into this conflagration enters stalwart Stewart Cook, a wandering caballero whose fiancée, Alexia Garcia, is lost behind enemy lines. Stewart may not be much of a rescuer by himself, but he’s tough as nails, determined and backed up by a first-class partner with menace to spare: Myles Adams is a classic western hero straight out of the old serials, a lantern-jawed, steely-eyed gunfighter with all the verbal dazzle of Gary Cooper. In fact, the laconic cowpokes do much more talking than shooting, but only after a sudden, brutal gunfight between the partners and some banditos kicks off the action. By the time Myles and Stewart ride into Santiago, Mexico, to mount a jailbreak of Alexia and her entire family, they’ve managed to enrage Jorge Trevino, “one immoral, pestilent bastard,” who’s figured out that there’s more money to be made in plundering the war-ravaged populace than in fighting the war itself. Trevino also holds a personal grudge against Myles, not to mention turning a lustful eye toward his mistress. Though they begin with an unappealing genre superficiality, Myles and Stewart eventually become fully formed characters. The story’s framing device–a reconstruction by Myles’ grandson of the bloody battles in Mexico–is unnecessary but innocuous. In between, there’s plenty of dramatic conflict and antiquated bravado to satisfy fans of milder western fare.
A straight-shooting, old-fashioned horse opera.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7860-1834-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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