After eight fine westerns detailing the exploits of Barnaby Skye as a mountain man during the 1850s and '60s, old pro Wheeler (Sierra, 1996, etc.) fills in the blanks in his colorful protagonist's background—beginning in 1826, when the frontiersman- to-be arrived in North America, through his backwoods apprenticeship in the Rockies. Shanghaied by a press gang off the streets of London at age 14, Skye spends 7 years aboard a Royal Navy frigate before he's able to jump ship at Fort Vancouver. Evading both the British sailors and Hudson's Bay Co. minions directed to bring him back alive, the seaman makes his way to the Columbia River basin. Once slated to attend Cambridge like his merchant father, young Skye hopes to reach Boston, enter Harvard, and secure the education that will ensure him his birthright. Along his wayward way, however, he falls in with friendly Shoshone Indians who conduct him to a so- called Rendezvous, an annual trappers' fair in the Cache Valley, safely outside Canadian jurisdiction. While at this hinterland jamboree, Skye wins the respect of such high-country legends as Jim Bridger and Jebediah Smith; he also encounters Many Quill Woman, the Crow lass who will soon become his wife. Still bent on reaching the New World's Cambridge, Skye then sets out on his own for St. Louis. Soon relieved of his horses and kit by marauding Blackfeet, he has little time to link up with a crew of freelance nimrods before hard snows hit the mountains. After further adventures, he joins forces with his new associates in the Yellowstone area, helps make the beaver trapping season a financial success, and winters with the Crows. Eventually finding the call of the wild a whole lot stronger than the lure of the classroom, Sky marries his dusky maiden and, come spring, sets out with his westering comrades on another hunt. A promising start in what appears to be an absorbing, authoritative series.
Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-86319-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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