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natcat's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
On the one hand, a delight - the long winded, purple prose descriptions of the beautiful scenery, which must be described in loving detail every time (and I’m not complaining)! The dramatic, overwrought turn of everyone’s internal thoughts and dialogue! The whole section in the middle that is a Robinson Crusoe-style exploration and setting up home in an isolated place! The starring role played by horses and everyone loving them a lot! The delightful ambiguous ending! Watching western tropes be created before your eyes and embraced with the maximum amount of drama possible! The way for the first quarter of the book I kept thinking that Jane, Lassiter, and Venters could fix at least some of their angst with a threesome! - and on the other hand less delightful - the bizarre pacing with the action-packed first third, the action packed last third, and an incredibly slow middle where everyone just goes around angsting! The heavy handed gender essentialism and continual talk of ‘feminine feeling’ in contrast to ‘manly action’, which prevents Jane from doing anything very interesting! The annoying child! The weird pacing where nothing happens for long stretches and interesting stuff happens offscreen for some reason!.
This book was written in 1912 with a lot of the baggage and biases that implies, and that is very clear, but I did enjoy a lot about it, and I was also surprised by quite a lot; Jane actually being a - and indeed the first - POV character, the romance novel everything of it (I’m formulating a theory where western novels might be romance novels aimed at men?), Venters actually ending up being way more of an active character than Lassiter, the well-drawn secondary characters.
This book was written in 1912 with a lot of the baggage and biases that implies, and that is very clear, but I did enjoy a lot about it, and I was also surprised by quite a lot; Jane actually being a - and indeed the first - POV character, the romance novel everything of it (I’m formulating a theory where western novels might be romance novels aimed at men?), Venters actually ending up being way more of an active character than Lassiter, the well-drawn secondary characters.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Animal death, Violence, and Racism
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