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.