Reviews with content warning for Kidnapping - Lonesome Dove

A western Oddysey. Very unlike any other western I’ve consumed before.

This one took me a minute to get though at almost 900 pages and one missstart. I started this on audio and abandoned it about halfway through because I thought it warranted a little more of my attention and I was so right. I’m glad I restarted from the beginning because it made me appreciate the story so much more. This is one I felt like I would have read and written a paper on in college. I wish I could be in a class and hear the debate and analysis over this one.

The length helped the epic timeline of the story have more impact. The multiple storylines were an annoyance at first but a delight once I settled in. I loved the interconnectivity. The ending felt a little rushed and tacked on. It was so close to being perfect.

The story was so heartbreaking and raw and real. Trajedy was matter of fact without the drama that most books add. It made the loss feel more like it does in real life. The book was so sad, so funny, so full of longing and what might have been. Hubris and comradery.

Last year it felt good to hit my reading goal, and this was a different kind of goal, to get through such a long book, but it was such a delight.

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This is certainly an epic. McMurtry spends 300 pages introducing his characters and then another 600 weaving their stories in and out of a 3000 mile cattle drive from Texas to Montana.

McMurtry obviously loves his subject: the book is full of western tropes but he manages to undermine the myths by showing how harsh and unforgiving frontier life was, and how survival depended on luck as much as judgement and skill.

The action is nicely paced. The characters are all deep, beautifully drawn and uniquely flawed, so you end up loving and admiring them but wanting to slap some sense into them too. The book is funny as well as exciting and sad. It’s worth reading for Gus’ hilarious monologues alone.

Some of the plot lines depend heavily on coincidence. Characters run into each other all the time and at one point McMurtry tries to explain this away by telling us there was only one road. The last few chapters are tragic and pretty bleak, but worse than that, the introspection goes on too long and gets a little boring.

I also wish the author had been a little braver in his myth busting. There’s a lot of frontier justice in this book and McMurtry can’t help justifying every lynching. I think it would have been more interesting and Captan Call had occasionally got the wrong guy.

Still a great book to read.

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