(I think I meant to delay the Guns of the Timberlands review until September, but I set it to post in early June in case I didn’t get another review up by then, and as it turned out… I didn’t get a review up by then. I didn’t even check in on my blog this month until now. So, you get two book reviews this month as I try to catch up on my review backlog. Hurray!)
Michael Wegner has been waiting since March for me to read and review his book. Thank you for your patience! I’m sorry that’s it a bit short, but I do have that backlog… and I’m working on something I may be aable to announce soon…
One of Mr Wegner’s goals is to write books that could be read by an entire family, which accounts for the feeling I got that this book was pitched in part towards a younger audience. There’s nothing particularly explicit in this story, although there are a couple of brief deaths and moments of peril.
And, as Mr Wegner puts it on his website: ” I was serious once, but I got better. Everyone needs a laugh now and then; it makes the day better. Go read something fun, smile, and pass it on!”
And that is exactly what he sets out to do – and achieves – with Letters from the Saddle. This book had me smiling.
Just after the American Civil War, Dewey Slocum, our hero, is a young man sent out westward (he starts in Arkansas and ends up in what is now Oklahoma) in search of his brother, who himself has gone out to chase down the men who beat their father.
Dewey writes back to their mother with regularity, even when he does not know where the next post office will be. (And he makes me ashamed to look at the pile of letters sitting on my desk waiting reply.) The short book (it is under 200 pages long) is a bit episodic at times, and some episodes worked better for me than others. Sometimes my editorial-self pointed out the transitions in the book could have used some smoothing out, and sometimes I stumbled over what might have been some anachronism-izing, (hard to avoid all together when you’re trying to do everything yourself as the author-publisher) but and and it essentially doesn’t matter.
Quite quickly, Dewey meets up with a young woman named Phyllis, who, as too many people feel like pointing out, is a biracial former slave, her father from Africa and her mother is Cherokee. Dewey and Phyllis become absolutely just travelling companions, totally not a couple. Really. Why does no one believe them when they tell them this?
A dog and a hawk join them on their travels. The fall into many adventures – to name three happenings within the story – there’s a bank robbery, a rattlesnake bite, and a kidnapping. (I absolutely heard Parley Baer as Chester Proudfoot going “He’s kidnapped her, he’s kidnapped her!” when the kidnapping took place – this was used for years as a Gunsmoke audio clip on satellite radio, they might even still be using it, I don’t know. Anyways.)
Everything moves along quite quickly – towards the end, I felt that my credibility was getting a bit strained – I’m not sure that just because anything could happen should mean that everything in the western genre kitchen sink of dramatic activies should happen in one story – and while I recognize the good intentions behind it, I felt that Mr Wegner spent a bit too much time telling us the obvious thing – that racism is bad – but the relationship between Dewey and Phyllis is delightful, the supporting cast in the book is definitely diverse, and everything (well, almost everything) winds up happily – and happily there is potential for a second book following the further adventures of this pair.
This isn’t a serious book, it’s a light-hearted, fun tale, which sets out to do what it wants to do quite competently, if not spectacularly in writing-craft terms. It is worth picking up if you haven’t any westerns laying around to share with a smile with your family.
As such, I give it three and a half screaming chicken hawks out of five.
Thank you for making a copy available for me to review, Mr Wegner.
If you’ve read this review and are thinking of picking up a copy of Letters from the Saddle – you can do so by following this link to Amazon where it is available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and as a paperback.
You could also head on over to Mr Wegner’s blog, he seems like a pretty friendly ‘un. (And he has baby wrens!)
VT Dorchester 