This lively series opener reveals why Wild West tales continue to entertain.
A Western adventure explores the danger and excitement of the stagecoach era.
In this latest foray into the Old West from Harris (A Novel Journey, 2019, etc.), readers are introduced to colorful driver Stagecoach Willy and his taciturn shotgun messenger, Ten. The two are dragged down from their mountaintop retirement cabin for a special assignment. They have to carry $250,000 in cash and gold and plans for a new type of sawmill from Portland, Oregon, to Sacramento. There is a wrinkle to which the old partners must agree. The plans are locked in a briefcase held by Kate Warren, a beautiful Pinkerton agent. To put Willy’s and Ten’s minds at ease, Kate lists her credentials, adding: “I can’t pee standing up, but I can do just about everything else you boys can do.” Kate quickly proves herself, even stopping the first attempt to rob the partners of their cargo. The group even adds a passenger, Sydney, a dog that was being mistreated at one stop. The quartet settles into the challenging routine of rolling from stop to stop over often treacherous roads, looking out for trouble. The four also bond as a result of their exhilarating exploits. In this first installment of a series, Harris deftly summons the spirits of the old pulps for a new generation. Long before armored cars, stagecoaches transported important cargo. The author’s intrepid odd couple have a history of success: The two men never lost a load during their time together. The gregarious Willy always has a story to tell, and Ten, too often his friend’s audience of one, longs for the quiet of his cabin. While this pair isn’t terribly nuanced, Kate proves a deeper character, being orphaned and ending up the head of her family at too young an age. The author’s thorough research is apparent in his vivid descriptions of the stagecoach life. What results is an invigorating novella with the feel of a fast-paced movie serial from yesteryear, which will leave readers pondering what will happen next to the heroes.
This lively series opener reveals why Wild West tales continue to entertain.Pub Date: June 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-205054-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Dusty Saddle Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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