Month: August 2018

Slave, Warrior, Queen, by Morgan Rice

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

The author  is certainly prolific: this series, Of Crowns and Glory is eight books, yet only her third-longest, not even half the length of The Sorceror’s Ring. Unfortunately, based on this, what she delivers in volume, is negated by the low quality. The first problem is the setting, which is a lazy version of ancient Rome, right down to a population kept in thrall by gladiatorial games. Except, it’s actually “Delos”, which seems a convenient way for the author to avoid having to do any research; she can then make up whatever she wants, since it’s not a “real” place. You certainly don’t get much sense of it being a world into which much thought has been put.

The heroine is 17-year-old Ceres, whose father is a weapon-smith to the monarchy, though this brings in barely enough money for the family to survive. When he has to go off to try and earn his fortune, Ceres is on thin ice, because her mother tries to sell her. She runs away, and gets a job in the palace, becoming the “squire” (for want of a better word) to Prince Thanos, the only member of the ruling class who is not a scumbag, and is as handsome as he is moral. [Insert eye-rolling here. Just once, I’d like to read about a character who was smart, kind and ugly…] Elsewhere, Ceres’s brother and boyfriend have taken up arms as part of a rebellion against cruel King Claudius.

You can probably figure out where the rest of this goes, with Thanos having a jealous fiancée, while Ceres bounces in and out of dungeons, and has unexplained magical powers that manifest only when necessary to the plot. The last is a particular annoyance, not least because her upbringing has led Ceres to be not exactly short of combat skills herself, in defiance of society’s mores. This aspect is sadly underdeveloped, and she spends more time moping in cells than putting her skills to use. Although the cliff-hanger ending, with Ceres thrown into the gladiatorial arena as a political pawn, suggests more might perhaps be made of this in ensuing volumes. And is it wrong of me to mention that she never even touches a bow, as the cover depicts? On further investigation, it’s a stock photo, used by at least one other novel…

The plot and characters might also have been bought off-the-shelf, since they are hardly any less generic. The simplistic politics on view are particularly irritating, with noble peasants being relentlessly oppressed by their cruel overlords (Thanos excepted). The story keeps cutting back and forth between the palace intrigue and the rebellion, and the two sides never manage to mesh: the latter seems more an annoying distraction than anything. Rice does deserve credit for killing off some unexpected characters, which provides some sense of peril. But the ratio of title present here is about 80% slave to 20% warrior, with queen present only at trace, “produced in a facility which processes peanuts” levels.

Author: Morgan Rice
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback.
Book 1 of 8 in the Of Crowns and Glory series.

Battlespace

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★½
“In space, no-one can hear you snore…”

This dates back to 2006, and was somewhat groundbreaking at the time, due to the very high volume of digital effects and CGI background work – it came out was three years before Avatar, as a yardstick. The key word here, however, is “volume”. For the effects make up for in quantity what they largely lack in quality, although you have to be impressed at the sheer ambition on view, especially when you don’t have a fraction of the resources which were available to James Cameron. More problematically, also missing is the skill necessary to handle a narrative, where there is simultaneously too much and not enough going on. The former is apparent in entire universe building which has to be accomplished in hard to digest expository chunks, and the latter makes itself known, courtesy of long stretches which are as devoid of interesting features as the Arizona landscapes in which they were shot.

I could spend a thousand words or more laying out the background here. Except, why bother, because it’s virtually irrelevant to what follows: it says a lot when a film is apparently so bored by its own mythology, it all but abandons it. There are instead, two basic chunks, with the first told mostly in voice-over flashback, Iva T. Stryyke recounting an adventure experienced by her mother, Colonel Mara Shrykke (both generations played by Connelly), centuries before, when she was trying to stop a weapon of mass destruction being readied for use in an ongoing inter-stellar conflict. At least, I think that’s what was going on. My will to live had largely been sucked out, by the endless scenes of her roaming a desert, followed by an enemy agent. It appears those were shot here in Arizona: I never knew we were located in America’s most boring state.

This fondness for using a gravel pit as a stand-in for an alien landscape will be recognized by anyone familiar with Doctor Who, and the second part of the story feels like it might have fitted in there too. Eventually, the daughter is stuck on a spaceship at the end of the universe – as in, its actual heat death. She’s the only thing standing between it, and a new Big Bang, which will start the cycle over again. Only, she has qualms about going into the void. It’s a very Whovian concept, and the debt clearly owed to BBC science-fiction extends to the voice of her computer, played by Paul Darrow, who was one of the stars in the iconic series, Blake’s 7. This is… not so iconic, though in Connelly’s defense, she does a half-decent job of looking the part (or parts), and there’s only so much anyone can do with lines like, “Never mess with a thirty-third century girl.” As a technical exercise, this has its moments, considering the era from which it dates. In virtually every other way, however, it’s a poor substitute for even eighties television.

Dir: Neil Johnson
Star: Eve Connelly, Blake Edgerton, Paul Darrow, Iva Franks Singer

The Heat

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★★★
“Warm, rather than hot.”

McCarthy appears to be Feig’s muse, having starred in his last four movies, from Bridesmaids through this, and then on to Spy and the Ghostbusters reboot. The results here, also fall somewhere in the middle: while decently amusing, this mis-matched cop comedy falls short of the unexpected glory which was Spy. Straight-laced FBI agent Sarah Ashburn (Bullock) is great at her job, but disliked by her peers for her officious attitude. In order to try and win a promotion, she accepts a case in Boston to locate an elusive and unknown drug lord, Simon Larkin. There, she immediately encounters and antagonizes a local cop, Shannon Mullins (McCarthy); Mullins is also a good law-enforcement agent, but the polar opposite of Ashburn, being loud- and foul-mouthed, and no respecter of authority. Inevitably, the two have to work together, and eventually develop respect and affection for each other, etc. as they solve the case. You know the drill.

The story here is incredibly hackneyed, and making the protagonists a pair of women is about the laziest twist imaginable by writer Katie Dippold. Mind you, she co-wrote the Ghostbusters reboot as well, so part of me wonders if her elevator pitches all consist of “(insert film name), but with women!” [Though for the record, she was not involved with the upcoming Ocean’s Eight] What salvages the film are the lead actresses, with both Bullock and McCarthy in equally fine form. The latter has that hyper-acidic persona down to a T, from the moment we first see Mullins, and she tells her boss, “I’ll be there sharply at go-fuck-yourself o’clock, if there’s no traffic.” Ashburn is at the other extreme, prissily tightly-wound, yet so inept personally, she has to kidnap a neighbour’s cat for affection since hers ran off. They’re a perfect match: Mullins doesn’t give a damn, because Ashburn gives them all.

It is at these two extremes when the movie is at its most entertaining, and that’s in the early going. As the film progresses, both of the characters drift towards the middle from the edges. They generally become less interesting as a result, though there’s still amusement to be had from Ashburn’s spectacularly incompetent attempts to be a bit sweary. There’s also a gloriously gory sequence, as she attempts to carry out a tracheotomy, having seen one on television. However, not all of the comedy works, and there’s absolutely no reason why this needs a running time of more than two hours. For example, the scene where they fight each other to go through a door first, goes on about three times as long as is either necessary or funny, and the scenes involving Mullins’s dysfunctional family left me entirely cold. They’d have been better off abandoning all efforts at the drug lord plot, and just given us 90 minutes of the central pair, at the Odd Couple counterpoints of their characters, and the resulting, delightful bickering.

Dir: Paul Feig
Star: Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy, Demián Bichir, Marlon Wayans

Megan Leavey

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★★★
“A tale of dogged determination.”

The crossing of war and animal genres of film isn’t one with much precedent, and you can see why: it would be difficult to balance those disparate elements. While this does a laudable effort, and manages to avoid sliding too far into the slippery road of sentimentality, it offers few surprises, even if you don’t know the true story on which it’s based.

Megan Leavey (Mara) opts to join the Marines after the death of her best friend leaves her feeling rudderless. While she gets through boot-camp successfully, she’s teetering on the edge of a discharge when a punishment detail introduces her to the canine corps. There, she meets Rex (Varco), a bomb-sniffing dog with whom she makes a connection – despite the mutt having issues of his own. Eventually, Megan gets assigned to the corps. She and Rex are sent to Iraq, where they have the hazardous task of finding the roadside IEDs, (Improvised Explosive Devices), an ever-present threat to American forces.

It’s there that the film is probably at its best, capturing the real sense of danger, lurking around every corner and in every encounter. It’s the little things which are most chilling: she’s scolded for telling an Iraqi kid Rex’s name, because it could be used against them. Turns out, the insurgents offer a bounty on dog handlers – particularly female ones. You’ll spend a good chunk of this time on the edge of your seat, knowing that “something” is going to happen, in a way I’ve don’t think I’ve experienced since The Hurt Locker.

Eventually, something does, and the film enters the second stage. Megan leaves the armed forces, suffering from injuries both physical and mental, and wants to take Rex with her. The military, however, have other plans, and he is sent back for another tour of duty. Megan becomes a relentless pest on his behalf, and when Rex is eventually set for retirement, ramps up the campaign to be allowed to adopt her partner. Except, he has been officially tagged as “unadoptable”, and incapable of being re-introduced to civilian life – effectively, a death sentence.

It’s interesting that this was re-titled for the dog in the British market, perhaps reflecting a different audience. And to be honest, I’m a cat person, which perhaps limits the impact this tale (tail?) of canine-human devotion will have. It all seems a bit one-sided: what exactly did Rex do to justify all Megan’s efforts? I’ll happily accept our cat sitting on my head and purring loudly at 6am, even if I suspect it’s less an expression of affection, than closer to “Get up and feed me, you lazy bastard.”

But regardless of species, any pet owner knows what it’s like to care, and by the end, you will be rooting for Megan to triumph. Mara’s performance is a winning one, and director Cowperthwaite is no stranger to emotionally-driven animal stories, though the work for which she’s best-known is the killer whale documentary, Blackfish. Despite some pacing problems, especially after the heroine returns home, the heart present here is undeniable, and makes for a decent movie to curl up with, alongside your animal companion of choice.

Dir: Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Star: Kate Mara, Varco, Ramon Rodriguez, Common
a.k.a Rex

Lizzie Borden’s Revenge

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★★★
“It’s just a bunch of hot chicks in their nighties, playing Truth or Dare.”

It would, certainly, be easy to look at the poverty-row production values here, and dismiss this contemptuously as a bad film. I mean, the very first shot supposedly sets the scene at the infamous New England house in 1892, where Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. But take a look. I’m fairly sure the trash cans to the right of the house are not of 19th-century vintage. And I am almost certain the palm trees on the left are not native to Massachusetts either. Given this, the awful use of CGI blood, etc. if you were to dismiss the film as the kind of sloppy work that gives B-movies a bad name, I wouldn’t argue.

And, yet… The line of dialogue which is the review tagline above, shows impressive self-awareness, while  the storyline seems deliberately cheesy: A bunch of sorority sisters on campus lockdown stage a seance. As one of them says, “With a blood relative of Lizzie Borden sitting right in the centre of our circle, something is going to happen, I just know it!” No prizes for guessing what. To quote the film once more, “We conjured up the ghost of Lizzie Borden and now her lesbian ass is haunting our sorority house?” [This isn’t for titillation: okay, not just for titillation: one theory about Borden involves her relationship with actress Nance O’Neil]

It is at its most amusing when pushing this knowledge of horror tropes, such as when the dwindling band of sorority sisters refuse to split up, leading to a conga line through the house. The characters in question may be stereotypes – the bimbo, the nerd who spouts bizarrely incoherent lines such as “A statistically higher chance of probability”, the troubled one, etc. – but most of the performances are decent enough, and it’s all impressively gynocentric. [This movie would pass the Bechdel Test, though perhaps indicates once more the uselessness of that ludicrous metric.] The men are relegated to minor roles of no real importance, and are, if anything, even more two-dimensional than the women. They also don’t shed their clothes as much: at the risk of stating the obvious, I am fine with this.

Ricci, who plays Lizzie’s descendant Leslie, is an adult star of some renown, yet is perfectly adequate here. Overall, I’ll confess this kept me considerably more amused than I expected from the early going, when the performance of the actor playing Mr. Borden almost had me reaching for the off button (it may have been saved by the always welcome presence of cult icon and scream queen Brinke Stevens, playing his wife). Certainly, you have to get past the shoddier, cringe-inducing aspects; having a taste for the trashy end of cinema is also necessary. However, director Devine is a veteran of horror as well as exploitation genres, and inserts enough sly nods to its conventions and cliches, that I was entertained. 

Dir: Dennis Devine
Star: Veronica Ricci, Shanalynne Wesner, Jenny Allford, Mindy Robinson

No Man Shall Protect Us

Video

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★★★½
“Well-manicured fists of fury.”

In the years leading up to the Great War, the suffragette movement in Great Britain was one of the great social causes. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) engaged in a campaign of protest and civil disobedience, intended to draw attention to their demand to give women the vote. Their actions were not without reaction by the authorities, however, with the activists frequently being harassed and arrested. To combat this, the WPSU established the “Bodyguard Society”, a group of women trained in self-defense, who could give as good as they got.

The preferred style was jiu-jitsu – or “Suffrajitsu” as it was nicknamed – which had arrived in Britain in the eighteen nineties, and the woman who taught it to the WPSU volunteers was Edith Garrud, who ran a school with her husband in London. Her role, and the talents of her pupils were clearly well-known by 1910, when the cartoon below appeared in satirical magazine Punch. As the struggle for votes increased in intensity over the coming year, the role of the Bodyguards in protecting the WPSU leaders increased. This reached a head in the infamous “Battle of Glasgow”, when a meeting in the Scottish city descended into violent disorder when local police tried to arrest Pankhurst.

This documentary tells the story of the Bodyguards, a facet of the movement somewhat overlooked in the historical record. It uses the standard documentary approach involving archival footage and a narrator (Bourne), but also contains re-enactments, both of interviews with actresses portraying Pankhurst (Miller), Garrud (Baker), etc. and some of the incidents described. The former generally prove rather more successful than the latter, because the film doesn’t have the budget to stage them credibly. For example, as depicted here, the Battle of Glasgow appears to have involved no more than half a dozen people, rather than 30 Bodyguards taking on 50 policemen (on a stage where the flower garlands were booby-trapped with barbed wire!).

On the other hand, the archival footage is fascinating and well-integrated, while the character interviews do a really good job of capturing the atmosphere of the time, and the passion of the suffragettes. [Though quite where the man playing the Glasgow Chief Constable gets his accent from, I’m less sure. It sounds like it was dredged from the bottom of the the Irish Sea, somewhere between Dublin and Scotland!] At 50 minutes, it’s a brisk watch, and I was left wanting to find out more about the topic, which is always a good indicator a documentary has done its job.

Credit goes to the makers for releasing the finished version online: you can check it out below. If you find your interest too has been piqued, Wolf has a website where you can satisfy that craving, including information on the graphic novel he authored, covering the same subject. While the suffragette movement largely took a back seat once the Great War started – proving women’s capabilities in ways protest marches could never hope to achieve – this shines an admirable light on an aspect which deserves to be better remembered.

Dir: Tony Wolf
Star: Debra Ann Miller, Lynne Baker, Lizzie Bourne, David Skvarla

The Legendary Adventures of the Pirate Queens, by James Grant Goldin

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

“Two women with swords was a sight that none of Vane’s men had ever imagined. It was like seeing a two-headed snake; one such monster would be a freak of nature, while two would indicate a terrible new species.”

Readers of the site should already be aware of Anne Bonney and Mary Read, as we covered them in our piece about women pirates a while back. They’re a good candidate for a story, because the known facts about them are relatively scant, allowing lots of scope for an author to fill in the blanks, however they wish. Goldin has no qualms on this front, freely admitting in the prologue, “A lot has just been made up.” This isn’t a bad thing, providing you’re looking for the “serio-comic novel” this is, not a recounting of the historical record. While based on the facts, and including both persona who existed and events which took place, Goldin does a good job of weaving them into a more complete narrative which, if unprovable at best, could have been how things happened.

After spending time in the military, and also becoming a widow, Mary Read is masquerading as “Martin” on a Dutch ship in the Caribbean when it is is captured by Calico Jack Rackham and his pirates. S/he and another member of the crew, Peter Meredith, defect to Rackham’s crew, where Read meets Bonney, the Captain’ lover. Subsequent issues include an encounter with Bonney’s ex-husband; Read’s daring rescue of Rackham and Bonney from New Providence, where Governor Woodes Rogers is trying to rid the colony of pirates; and the return of Rackham’s former boss, Captain Charles Vane. It ends with a grandstand finale, in which Vane seeks to recapture New Providence, only to find his ship facing a rather better-armed Spanish ship with the same aim, as Read (by this point “outed” as a woman) and Bonney try to spike the fortress’s guns.

Indeed, about all there isn’t, is much in the way of actual piracy, though only after it was all over did I notice this omission. And it’s occasionally educational. I never realized pirates were so… democratic. For according to the articles the crew sign, “The Captain shall be chosen by majority vote of the Company, and shall have supreme power during a battle. But before and after, every man shall have an equal vote in affairs of moment.” Who knew? [I’m presuming this is accurate, anyway: googling “pirates majority vote” led me down a rabbit-hole involving the Pirate Party of Iceland…] It makes for a fast, light read, driven by a bunch of engaging central characters who sound like they would be fun to be around, with unconventional quirks that play against pirate stereotype, e.g. Rackham’s desire to be considered witty.

Perhaps they’re too engaging? For the book sometimes feels in need of a true antagonist to balance the scales, a really hissable villain, with Governor Rogers and Captain Vane both turning out to be not entirely bad after all. Meredith also comes over a bit underdeveloped, a milquetoast romantic interest for Mary; it occasionally seems as if he’s there mostly to defuse any potential lesbian subtext between her and Anne. On the other hand, the relationship between Jack and Anne is spot-on, a fiery combination of steel and gunpowder which can go from volcanic passion to equally fiery confrontation in the blink of an eye. The novel was based off a script Goldin wrote for a prospective TV series, which makes sense, as it come across as visual in style, with the battles unfolding easily in your mind’s eye. Shame it wasn’t picked up: he says, “I really think the story bothers producers on some level. I also do think that, even now, the shadow of Cutthroat Island is long and dark.”

Still, we will always have the novel, and it was refreshing to read something which, for once, worked perfectly as a standalone story, rather than dropping the reader off a cliff-hanger, with an exhortation to buy the next in the series. A sequel is planned down the road, but Goldin got distracted by another series, on the children of the Norse gods. That should hopefully be finished by the end of 2018, then he promises to work on the further adventures of Anne and Mary. I’m looking forward to that.

Author: James Grant Goldin
Publisher: Basilisk Books, available through Amazon as both an e-book and a paperback.
A free copy of the book was supplied to me, in exchange for an honest review.

Avenge the Crows: The Legend of Loca

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★★★½
“Though I’m still not sure what the title means…”

This feels like a low-budget project in many ways, but manages to punch above its weight, in part due to an impressive supporting cast. While Lou Diamond Phillips, Danny Trejo and Steven Bauer are nowhere near as important as their names on the cover might suggest, their presence provide a solid foundation on which the less well-known members of the cast can build. In particular, Danay García as Loca; having bailed on Fear the Walking Dead after about two episodes, I wasn’t aware of her, but on the basis of this, she’s a name on whom we’ll be keeping an eye.

Gabaeff, as well, has some interesting shots in his directorial locker. At times, this almost reminded me of Memento in the structure: it’s only at the end that you are given the necessary knowledge to  understand all that has happened. Even on a smaller scale, the layout is often fractured. More than once, a character gets a phone-call, and the film then jumps back in time, and over to the person on the other end of the line, to show what led up to them making that call. As such, it takes a bit of getting your brain around – yet the payoff, in the “Aha!” moment where you realize how it connects, is gratifying.

An interesting twist is that Loca is not the executor of the revenge, as is usually the case – she’s the target for it. Casper (Phillips) is in prison, but a henchman there, Joker (the genuinely scary-looking Flores), is about to be released. Joker is told to “send a message” to Loca, through her niece, Cammy (Rivera). But he goes further than Casper intended, and rapes Cammy. That starts Loca on a search for protection, but the gun-dealer she visits to acquire weapons turns out to be targeted for some retribution of his own, and Loca is dragged into that as well. Handling all this will require her to navigate dangerous waters, and bring together enemies to face a common foe.

There’s a strong scent of grim reality here: I don’t know if the tattoos everyone is sporting were “real” or not (likely a mix), but I don’t think I’ve seen a more inked-up feature. You get the feeling the people involved are largely familiar with the environment in question – not least, of course, Trejo, whose background as a felon-turned-star actor deserves to become a movie of its own. Here, he plays the owner of the bar where Loca hangs out, and is as gloriously gruff and down to earth as ever. The rest of the cast all fit their roles well. If the eventual resolution (where Bauer eventually turns up, after we had virtually abandoned hope!) feels a little unlikely and convenient, given the complexities of what had gone before, this doesn’t undo the generally solid work here. It’s better than I expected going in.

Dir: Nathan Gabaeff
Star: Danay García, Emilio Rivera, Michael Flores, Angelique Rivera

Breakdown Lane

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★★
“In need of some roadside assistance.”

An initial twist on the zombie apocalypse and an appealing heroine aren’t enough to save this. By the end, while said heroine has transformed into a mayhem-dealing machine, any fresh elements have been discarded, for a low-budget rehash of ones which we’ve seen far too often already. It starts intriguingly, with Kirby Lane (Moore) “ambushed” by a woman in a camper with a sick man at a gas station, while on the way to meet her boyfriend (Cushing). When her car breaks down in the middle of absolutely nowhere, the only connection to the outside world is Max (Howell), the agent for her on-board emergency help provider. But things in the outside world are deteriorating rapidly, and the tow-truck Max dispatches… well, let’s just say, it might be a while. Meanwhile, Kirby has to handle the perils which threaten her, including humans both infected and cannibalistic, as she tries to fulfill her promise to link up with Max.

The combination of zombies and deserts reminded me of It Stains the Sands Red, which I’d recently seen. And, like there, the makers apparently realized half-way through that the remote setting they’d chosen couldn’t actually sustain a feature, and opted to revert back to over-familiar tropes. While ending with the same overall grade as Stains, it gets there in a rather different way. This clearly has a far smaller budget, and is significantly less technically-accomplished [if the faux comic-book interludes don’t annoy the hell out of you after ten minutes… Wait longer…] But unlike Stains, it has a heroine who comes over as genuine and likable. Courtesy of Moore’s performance, you want to see Kirby survive, and that goes some distance to help paper over the obvious cracks.

Some distance, however, remains short of enough. The contrivance of having Kirby push her car across the terrain, as shelter and so she can keep hanging out with Max, is flat-out ridiculous. And once she gets back to civilization, the film can do nothing except bang out the low-budget zombie notes with which any genre fan is already familiar. Kirby’s transition into a tooled-up bad-ass momentarily piqued interest here, except it comes out of nowhere – and serves no particular purpose either, since there isn’t enough time left for it to become a significant factor. By the end, it has largely dissolved into another cheap horror film, indistinguishable from the rest, and neither particularly good nor bad as such things are concerned.

Although, here’s something odd. The film makes much of its Canadian-ness in the end credits, but unless they’ve started growing saguaros up North, looks to me like it was largely filmed in an utterly uncredited Arizona. That applies both to the desert scenes and the later urban ones. In particular, there’s a garage which is located about three miles from GWG Towers here, and one of the post-apocalypse vehicles seems to belong to a cosplay group we’re familiar with, the Department of Zombie Defense. Sheesh, how’s a state supposed to grow its film industry?

Dir: Robert Conway, Bob Schultz
Star: Whitney Moore, Stephen Tyler Howell, Aric Cushing

Ride the River, by Louis L’Amour

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Goodreads characterizes this novel, set in 1840, as the fifth volume in the author’s Sackett series. The fictional Sackett family, in L’Amour’s writings, are descended from tough, larger-than-life Barnabas Sackett, who emigrated to America in the 1600s and settled on the frontier, and who laid down a law for his descendants that whenever a Sackett was in trouble, the rest were bound to lend their aid. This book is indeed about a Sackett, and no doubt chronologically the fifth in that sequence. But the sequence forms a multi-generational saga in which the individual books are generally about different people; though some knowledge of the family origins, as mentioned above, might be helpful (and is repeated in the text of this book, for readers who didn’t read the series opener), they can be read perfectly well as stand-alones. (I haven’t read any of the other Sackett novels.) L’Amour also wrote sequences of novels and stories about two other fictional families that bred adventurous pioneers, the Chantrys and the Talons, whose paths sometimes cross those of the Sacketts –and the paths of a couple of the Chantrys will bring them into this tale as well.

Sixteen-year old Echo Sackett, of the Tennessee Sacketts, lives in the mountains with her family. Her pa is recently dead; her brothers are on an extended trapping expedition further west, and her uncle is laid up from a bear attack. So when an unusual circumstance brings an ad in a peddler-borne Pennsylvania newspaper to light, seeking the youngest descendant of one Kin Sackett to claim an inheritance, it falls to Echo to undertake the long and somewhat dangerous round trip to Philadelphia to receive and bring back the money. Readers accustomed to judging teens by the most immature and irresponsible examples that 21st-century American entitlement culture can produce might well see this as a foredoomed exercise that should never have been contemplated. But Echo is a product of a very different kind of culture. A crack shot who packs a pair of Doune pistols (see this link: http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2010/12/pistols-highland-pistol.html ) and is accustomed to shooting game for the table without missing, self-reliant, mature and capable Echo is a formidable young woman, not a child. She might need her cool head and firearms skills (and her “Arkansas toothpick”) on this trip, because there are those who didn’t want that ad seen to start with, and who’d prefer to have that money in their own pockets, rather than hers.

One reviewer said he felt this novel was “gimmicky.” I’m not sure what he considered the “gimmick” –possibly the protagonist’s gender, or the Sackett family’s clannish ethos of sticking together and helping each other in the face of trouble, including attacks by outsiders. Personally, I didn’t consider either element a gimmick. For me, seeing competence and fighting skills on the distaff side of the equation is a strong plus; I don’t see those kinds of qualities as inconsistent with female nature in any way, and Echo has plausible reasons for her characteristics. The Sackett ethic strikes me as something all families could profit by internalizing, and as such a worthwhile message for contemporary society. L’Amour’s knowledge of his settings, from 1840s Appalachia to distant Philadelphia, and of relevant history, is clearly extensive; he brings his world to life well. The characters, especially Echo herself, are vividly drawn and evoke reactions from the reader. In much of his work, L’Amour’s plotting is often predictable, but he managed to take me by surprise with one key development here –in a good way! There’s no sex and very little bad language here, and respectful treatment of a black character. With plenty of effective action scenes, the book is a pretty quick read.

There’s also a element of low-key, but serious, romantic attraction that develops in the book. For some readers, this will be problematic because of Echo’s age; while the age difference per se isn’t excessive, at this time of her life, it happens to put her love interest above 18 while she’s below that age. This didn’t scandalize me, in context; as I said, Echo is a woman, not a child (and in her community, she’s considered to be of a normal marriageable age). I didn’t consider the mutual attraction to be in any sense pedophilic or abnormal.

My one criticism of the book is the slipshod writing/editing in several places. Echo serves as first-person narrator for most of the book; but for scenes to which she isn’t privy, or where he wants to give us a different perspective, L’Amour occasionally uses other viewpoint characters, in third person. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and it even enhances the story at times. But at other times, L’Amour forgets which narrative thread he’s using, and is inconsistent with pronoun use in the same sentence or paragraph. That takes a reader out of the story, and is particularly frustrating when you’re reading this aloud (as I was, to my wife). Just for that reason, I deducted a half star.  But that didn’t keep me from really liking the book! Any read by L’Amour has always been a winner for me, and this one was no exception.

Author: Louis L’Amour
Publisher: Bantam, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.
Book 5 of 19 in the Sacketts series.