Fast-paced, energetic and fun; a dime novel for modern intellectuals.
Watt O’Hugh tangles with love, danger and high adventure in Drachman’s engaging tale of Western science fiction and amazing fantasy.
On the surface, Watt O’Hugh’s beginnings mirrored many who dwell in a time of poverty and strife. Born in 1842, the young man’s existence could have been chalked up to a textbook stereotype, like a New York City Oliver Twist. Were it not for his special abilities, his could easily have been a story that would fit nicely into a work of prose dashed off by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Ralph Waldo Emerson. O’Hugh’s life veers from normalcy, however, when he learns the ways of magic and embarks on a journey throughout Earth’s history. In a pompous literary world ripe with mundane characters, Drachman pens a standout lead in the character of Watt O’Hugh. The cool hero’s tale is told in charming, romping detail, from the magical adventurer’s poor childhood in the Five Points and the Tomb, to his notorious, gun-toting dalliances in the Wild West and his wilder exploits through time itself. Were it not for a few lurid scenes of romance and a humble allotment of expletives, the book’s first-person narrative would surely win over a younger audience as well. O’Hugh’s singular name, derived from the words “what” and “who,” adds to the character’s simple charm. Time travel proves to be an enduring ingredient for fiction authors; from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Stephen King’s The Langoliers, the uses for jumping in and out of the present never fails to develop a story to a slam-bang conclusion. Adding legitimate historical figures, such as the esteemed author Oscar Wilde, to the fictional mix builds levels of believability to the time traveling romp’s fast-paced flavor. While occasionally too expeditious in the telling, this introductory tale of a planned trilogy often has the fleeting pace found in many of the historic Western pulps authored in the 1800s.
Fast-paced, energetic and fun; a dime novel for modern intellectuals.Pub Date: June 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0578085906
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Chickadee Prince Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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