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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
I found this incredibly hard to follow and not all that interesting. Mattie jumps around a lot going off on tangents. At points, it was brilliant, at others it was dull and clunky.
A shame as this book came highly recommended.
A shame as this book came highly recommended.
Westerns aren’t for me but I can see how people really like this author
I feel like it hits it's stride in the last couple chapters. Before that it's a bit of a chore to get through
adventurous
dark
funny
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I was surprised at how much I liked this book, probably because I know of (and have seen snippets of) the John Wayne movie, and he's not my favorite. But he is not the protagonist of the book; that is 14-year-old Mattie Ross, out to avenge her father, narrating the story as an elderly spinster. I unexpectedly fell in love with her character, despite all her blind spots and black-and-white thinking.
I was surprised, since I am not a Western fan, that I enjoyed reading this book and Mattie's narration. This was part of a community BIG READ, and as I frequently find, these books stretch the boundaries of what I normally read.
A chapter in The Believer's Read Hard book, entitled 'Like Cormac McCartney, but funny' by Ed Park, inspired me to seek out this book. And a very favourable quote on the cover by Roald Dahl, told me that I was going to enjoy this book very much. A fantastic monologue of Mattie Ross detailing her quest to avenge her father's death. I will now seek out the two film versions to see how they compare.
"A sanguinary ambuscade" - some of the language in True Grit is tremendous!
Unpopular opinion: the movie was better than the book.
I found the story sluggish and the dialogue stilted, bordering on unrealistic. I think my main problem was the dialogue. Portis used hardly any contractions and, while I know the book was portraying a more formal time, it didn’t come across in an authentic way. Rather, it read like a school paper.
I also think the storyline could have benefited from a subplot when there really wasn’t one.
Anyway, it wasn’t terrible, wasn’t great. Mattie might call it “middling” if she were writing this review. The movie tracks the book extremely closely and does a better job of making awkward dialogue work. Save yourself a few hours and watch it instead.
I found the story sluggish and the dialogue stilted, bordering on unrealistic. I think my main problem was the dialogue. Portis used hardly any contractions and, while I know the book was portraying a more formal time, it didn’t come across in an authentic way. Rather, it read like a school paper.
I also think the storyline could have benefited from a subplot when there really wasn’t one.
Anyway, it wasn’t terrible, wasn’t great. Mattie might call it “middling” if she were writing this review. The movie tracks the book extremely closely and does a better job of making awkward dialogue work. Save yourself a few hours and watch it instead.
Wow. An absolute rarity of page-turning genre story in a really remarkable literary voice. True Grit is mesmerizing for its compelling Wild West landscape and thought provoking in its narration and period tone.
When 14 year old Mattie Ross finds out her father has been murdered in cold blood by a man he hired out of kindness, she determines that she will do whatever it takes to see that he is brought to swift and severe justice. Traveling on her own and strategically outwitting her minders and those she does business with, she settles her fathers affairs and begins to look for someone with authority and “True Grit” who will help her track down the criminal, someone prone to shoot first and ask questions later. And she will find that person in a rotund, walrus-mustached US Marshall who once rode with Quantrill. She will find that person in Rooster Cogburn.
This book would be pretty good for its story and pacing alone. It would stand high among thrilling genre novels of Wild West action. But what is truly impressive about True Grit, what makes it a timeless masterpiece, is the incredibly consistent and pervasive voice of the narrator, the shrewdly religious old spinster Mattie Ross. Portis gives her a straightforward no-nonsense attitude that caused regular digressions within the story that somehow work to its advantage. The reader wants to hear Mattie Ross get on with the action but never minds it when she randomly begins to digress into the history of Arkansas politics or the Bible verses which support her perspectives on law. She speaks of murder and violence and hard living without pause, but she hammers home her own convictions of what is justice and ethical in business, law, and religion. She expects foolishness from humanity (men?) and lives as best she can (as an intentionally single woman) to bring financial and legal and philosophical order in the midst of a chaotic western world.
Read it once and I suspect you’ll want to read it over and over again.
When 14 year old Mattie Ross finds out her father has been murdered in cold blood by a man he hired out of kindness, she determines that she will do whatever it takes to see that he is brought to swift and severe justice. Traveling on her own and strategically outwitting her minders and those she does business with, she settles her fathers affairs and begins to look for someone with authority and “True Grit” who will help her track down the criminal, someone prone to shoot first and ask questions later. And she will find that person in a rotund, walrus-mustached US Marshall who once rode with Quantrill. She will find that person in Rooster Cogburn.
This book would be pretty good for its story and pacing alone. It would stand high among thrilling genre novels of Wild West action. But what is truly impressive about True Grit, what makes it a timeless masterpiece, is the incredibly consistent and pervasive voice of the narrator, the shrewdly religious old spinster Mattie Ross. Portis gives her a straightforward no-nonsense attitude that caused regular digressions within the story that somehow work to its advantage. The reader wants to hear Mattie Ross get on with the action but never minds it when she randomly begins to digress into the history of Arkansas politics or the Bible verses which support her perspectives on law. She speaks of murder and violence and hard living without pause, but she hammers home her own convictions of what is justice and ethical in business, law, and religion. She expects foolishness from humanity (men?) and lives as best she can (as an intentionally single woman) to bring financial and legal and philosophical order in the midst of a chaotic western world.
Read it once and I suspect you’ll want to read it over and over again.