With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother’s gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father’s route on maps at the subscription library and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes, in reckless pursuit of the unknown. (Summary and pic from goodreads.com)
My Review: I must admit that I don’t read a lot of westerns. I used
to love the Storm Testament series
when I was in junior high and high school. They were written by a Utah-based
author, Lee Nelson, and although I’m not from Utah, my grandparents lived there
and when we would go visit them and stay for a week in the summer I would raid
their basement bookshelves (even back then I was reading All The Things) and
just devoured that series. When they passed away, I took all of those books for
my own bookshelves and I look back at them with fond memories. A few years ago,
I inadvertently met Lee Nelson’s daughter and I have to tell you, I was
fangirling majorly! I was trying to keep my cool and still get an invitation to
meet her dad, but I never quite got around to asking. Oh, the missed
opportunities.
When I saw this little book I decided to check it out. It
is written like a Western, and I really enjoyed it. I’ve always been interested
in books that do a good job creating a time and place, and I feel like this
book did just that. I could feel the loneliness of the isolated countryside,
and the simplicity of life and the complexity to pull off living during this
time. The writing style was really unique. It was written third person, but the
omniscient feeling was almost disconnected. This made for a very beautifully
rendered reading that felt like both the simplicity and complexity of Western life
I described above. There is an art to being able to achieve both things at
once—both simplicity of writing and a depth of meaning, and Davies does just
that. It is also a rather short book, and yet a lot was achieved in that short
little span. Again, sometimes it doesn’t take a whole ton of words to get a
whole ton of things said.
I really enjoyed the story in this book. I felt like it
had an almost fantastical feel to it, although obviously there was not fantasy.
I could imagine what this adventurer was thinking of when he headed off to find
huge beasts whose bones had been discovered, and I can’t help but think that to
him, he would have felt this same feeling of excitement and magic that Davies
conveyed to the reader when he set off to see if he could find these
unbelievable animals. He was able to capture so well the feeling of excitement
and discovery that one would have felt while crossing into unknown territory.
That was one of the things I enjoyed about this book, actually, is that it did
a good job of capturing the wonder and excitement of discovery in a vastly
uncharted land. Those lands still exist today, but those of us who will
experience actual physical exploration of them are very few as opposed to those
who lived back in the time of new land and new territory.
This story had some really sad elements in it, and they
were resolved in interesting ways. Davies pulled no punches when it came to her
characters, and it paid off. I feel like I have a natural inclination to
wanting things to work out the way I think they should at the end of a book,
and yet an author like Davies can give the characters a more natural character
arc that works and makes sense in the end.
A short little book that packs a lot of story and
interest in just a few pages, I recommend this book to fiction readers who
enjoy a good story with a highly developed time and place. I enjoyed it and I
think that other readers will find it interesting and a good read as well.
My Rating: 4 stars
For the sensitive
reader: There are some limited incidences of sexual abuse without a lot of
intense description, but it still may be triggering.
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