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archaicrobin's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I started this book in 2016 and looked all over for it. I finally found it at an old used bookstore for $8 and was so excited I started it immediately since I’d loved the other book I’d read by this author. I started this book in 2016 and it was so tragic and hard for me to get through that I put it back on my shelf and it sat there until February 2023 when I picked it for the Unread Shelf prompt “courage” because I knew it would take a lot of courage to finally finish The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, and I was not wrong.
I loved this book but it also was absolutely horrific, devastating, and heartbreaking. Spanbauer is a very talented writer with beautiful prose, lively characters, and visceral storytelling. He is not afraid to literally tear your heart out with his stories that are so mired in the tragic truths of our nation. In this historical literary novel about life, love, belonging, sex, and family set in the Wild West in the small town of Excellent Idaho, Spanbauer tells a tragic tale from the perspective of a half white, half Native American boy named Out in the Shed as he grows up working in a brothel after his mother is murdered. Shed shares his story but also the stories of all the other people in his small town, the good and bad alike all play part in Shed’s story of love, loss, family, survival, and self discovery. They were a good family.
While I absolutely love this book I do not recommend it to anyone that may have issues with many triggers you can expect to find in a historical novel set in the U.S. during the chaotic and dangerous cowboy era of the 1800s. Warnings include: rape, sex, misogyny, grief, death, violence, gore, amputation, incest, polyamory, racism, hate crime, torture, sexual assault, racial slurs, bigotry, lynching, atrocities of the past, and this was also written in the nineties so there tons of racial stereotypes which again were common during this Wild West era.
If you can handle these and stomach them, there is such a powerful story here but again I don’t recommend this to the faint of heart! This book had me sobbing and it wasn’t even over, I still had almost a 100 pages left and it was a struggle all the at until the end but I loved it.
I loved this book but it also was absolutely horrific, devastating, and heartbreaking. Spanbauer is a very talented writer with beautiful prose, lively characters, and visceral storytelling. He is not afraid to literally tear your heart out with his stories that are so mired in the tragic truths of our nation. In this historical literary novel about life, love, belonging, sex, and family set in the Wild West in the small town of Excellent Idaho, Spanbauer tells a tragic tale from the perspective of a half white, half Native American boy named Out in the Shed as he grows up working in a brothel after his mother is murdered. Shed shares his story but also the stories of all the other people in his small town, the good and bad alike all play part in Shed’s story of love, loss, family, survival, and self discovery. They were a good family.
While I absolutely love this book I do not recommend it to anyone that may have issues with many triggers you can expect to find in a historical novel set in the U.S. during the chaotic and dangerous cowboy era of the 1800s. Warnings include: rape, sex, misogyny, grief, death, violence, gore, amputation, incest, polyamory, racism, hate crime, torture, sexual assault, racial slurs, bigotry, lynching, atrocities of the past, and this was also written in the nineties so there tons of racial stereotypes which again were common during this Wild West era.
If you can handle these and stomach them, there is such a powerful story here but again I don’t recommend this to the faint of heart! This book had me sobbing and it wasn’t even over, I still had almost a 100 pages left and it was a struggle all the at until the end but I loved it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gaslighting, Genocide, Gore, Incest, Infidelity, Medical content, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Murder, Grief, Homophobia, Injury/Injury detail, Sexism, Adult/minor relationship, Racial slurs, Racism, Religious bigotry, Sexual violence, Torture, Abandonment, Cursing, Gun violence, Hate crime, Rape, Self harm, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Alcohol, Animal death, Biphobia, Child abuse, Classism, Drug use, Fire/Fire injury, Pedophilia, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Blood, Body horror, Colonisation, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, and Violence
legsbian's review against another edition
Oh, the humanity! No star rating because I'm not entirely sure if I liked the book, but it's safe to say that I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Years later, when I'd tell Dellwood Barker about sitting on the rock that jutted out, at sunset, my mother smoke and fire behind me, he'd listen—Dellwood would listen. Then he'd say this:
"Smoke and wind and fire are all things you can feel but can't touch. Memories and dreams are like that too. They're what this world is made up of. There's really only a very short time that we get hair and teeth and put on red cloth and have bones and skin and look out eyes. Not for long. Some folks longer than others. If you're lucky, you'll get to be the one who tells the story: how the eyes have seen, the hair has blown, the caress the skin has felt, how the bones have ached."
The list of content warnings should probably be about a mile long. And if you prefer your novels with a certain Christian morality to them, this is not the book for you.
Fulfilled the Idaho prompt of the A Queer Literary Tour Through the USA reading challenge.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcohol, Animal death, Blood, Body horror, Colonisation, Death of parent, Drug use, Gore, Incest, Murder, Racism, Rape, and Sexual content
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