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Includes the name: James M. Gaitis

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This review was written for LibraryThing Member Giveaways.
very interesting look into what it was like to live in the old west time in Montana. there are some funny parts to this book and some serious ones. i like the fact that in each of the little stories, characters from previous stories were somehow intertwined.
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ailleth | 1 anden anmeldelse | Jun 30, 2009 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Member Giveaways.
Gaitis's novel of the founding of Montana is a fun read, meaty enough to be satisfying, but not so bogged down in historical detail that it forgets to tell an interesting story.

Gaitis tells the story of the rise and fall of Henry Plummer, who shows up in the gold rush town of Bannack City in the eighteen-sixties dressed to the nines and followed by rumors of what he might or might not have done in California and a few other wild places. We see him through the eyes of five different men - boys, mostly, really - at varying distances from the man himself, and on various sides of the controversy that seems to center on him.

I found myself wishing for a map of territorial Montana, or, more accurately, of the territory that would become Montana, since it didn't exist in its own right at the time of the events in this book. Bannack City is now a state park, and it's a little difficult to envision the geography and topography of the novel looking at a Google map.

Some of Gaitis's sentences bug me a little, but his miners' committee trial scenes are both hilarious and terrifying, and really excellently drawn. His lawyers - and pretenders to the title - are some of the most interesting and most ridiculous characters in the book.

My one real quibble is that there's little difference between the five voices in this novel, despite the vastly different origins and experiences of the five speakers. On the other hand, Gaitis avoids the easy, amateurish, and infinitely more irritating solution of giving each character prominent verbal tics or badly-rendered regional accents or dialects. Using five perspectives to tell the story was, I think, a really interesting way of both giving the reader information and keeping the reader from having too much information, while not feeling intrusively or arbitrarily expository or withholding. Occasionally, though, I had to remind myself that we'd moved on to a new narrator. In the end, though, the story ties together really well, I think, into a narrative that makes me really glad I'm not a prospector or a resident of a gold rush town.

It also makes me want to learn more about how the west was settled. A good, interesting, accessible read, well worth it, and not at all prone to either the romanticizing or moralizing that a lot of the historical novels I've read have indulged in.
… (mere)
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Markeret
upstairsgirl | 1 anden anmeldelse | Jun 20, 2009 |
 
Markeret
Farella | Jun 27, 2012 |

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Værker
4
Medlemmer
20
Popularitet
#589,235
Vurdering
3.8
Anmeldelser
3
ISBN
7