An old-fashioned Western extolling the heroic exploits of two Texas Rangers in the 1800s.
Shambley offers a debut historical novella in the style of a buddy movie. Mike Rivers was a bounty hunter who always got his man before he became the sheriff of Applegate, Texas. One day, he returns home after tracking a killer to discover that the Clayton brothers, whom he’d arrested some years ago, have murdered his wife and son. Rivers resigns as sheriff, tracks down the Claytons, and is about to exact vengeance when he runs into Texas Ranger Tom Slade. The lawman intervenes, arrests the brothers, and then convinces Rivers to join him as a Ranger. The narrative is divided into five sections; in the first, the two main characters become partners, and the rest detail various episodes over the course of the next several years. For some reason, Shambley sets the second section, “Rustlers,” 15 years after the first, while the third, “Payday,” jumps back 14 years. As a result, the episodes seem more like stand-alones than a continuing story. There are some mysteries to solve (who’s stealing cattle in “Rustlers”; who’s behind the stagecoach robberies in “Payday”), a few gunfights, and some light banter. Mike is shot at in “Lost” and gets knocked unconscious when he falls off his horse; an old mountain man cares for him while he gradually recovers from amnesia. (His trusty and very protective dog, Sam, never leaves his side.) Mike is shot at again in the final section, “Friends In Need.” By the end of this quick read, Shambley makes it clear the two friends, despite some mishaps, will continue to protect and serve. The narrative is plot-driven, simple, and competent, with minimal character definition or development, although readers do find out more information about Mike than they do about Tom. It’s easy to imagine the two staring down bad guys in an old, clean TV Western, such as Gunsmoke. The pace is comfortable throughout, and the format lends itself to readers casually and sporadically picking the book up for quick distractions. A pleasant escape that’s light on tension, suitable for fans of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5245-4635-9
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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