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chrissie_whitley 's review for:
True Grit
by Charles Portis
Headstrong, independent, and sometimes witty, Mattie Ross is a fourteen-year-old girl whose sole mission in True Grit is to find and kill Tom Chaney, the man known to have murdered her father. Portis has created a girl of tenacity and the very grit she spends the opening of the book seeking in a U.S. Marshal to aid her in finding Chaney. Her choice is Rooster Cogburn, a marshal known for being without fear and "the meanest one . . . a pitiless man, double-tough."
The introduction to the character and mettle of Mattie is nearly perfect. Her courage and forthrightness in the face of the murder of her father, the negotiations relating to the ponies Frank Ross had purchased just prior to his death, and the hiring of Cogburn to hunt down her man oozes with determination and stalwartness. She is one of those children who was born an adult.
Cogburn is a very typical, nearly washed up, drunkard of a man, yet his complexity isn't limited to just being this. He is warm, sarcastic, humorous, boastful, and dependable—and he's also calculating, capable, cold, and humorless. He's a wonderfully lived in person, and his time on the page is always necessary and essential to the plot. Cogburn is a wonderful complement to Mattie, and she to him. Her fondness for him, despite the faults she proclaims to dislike in others, is evident and you see how her opinion of him grows, wanes, and solidifies as their journey leads toward the book's ending.
Portis writes vividly, capturing a roughness in the characters littered throughout, as well as in a period of time when the United States was in transition and unsure of what it would grow up to be. And yet there is a timelessness to True Grit that transcends the cowboy era of the West and could be set nearly anywhere, at nearly any time, and still maintain the quality of the story and characters.
The introduction to the character and mettle of Mattie is nearly perfect. Her courage and forthrightness in the face of the murder of her father, the negotiations relating to the ponies Frank Ross had purchased just prior to his death, and the hiring of Cogburn to hunt down her man oozes with determination and stalwartness. She is one of those children who was born an adult.
Cogburn is a very typical, nearly washed up, drunkard of a man, yet his complexity isn't limited to just being this. He is warm, sarcastic, humorous, boastful, and dependable—and he's also calculating, capable, cold, and humorless. He's a wonderfully lived in person, and his time on the page is always necessary and essential to the plot. Cogburn is a wonderful complement to Mattie, and she to him. Her fondness for him, despite the faults she proclaims to dislike in others, is evident and you see how her opinion of him grows, wanes, and solidifies as their journey leads toward the book's ending.
Portis writes vividly, capturing a roughness in the characters littered throughout, as well as in a period of time when the United States was in transition and unsure of what it would grow up to be. And yet there is a timelessness to True Grit that transcends the cowboy era of the West and could be set nearly anywhere, at nearly any time, and still maintain the quality of the story and characters.