Book Reviews

The Little BrideAnna Solomon314 pages, softcover: $15. Riverhead, 2011. Anna Solomon’s fascinating first novel The Little Bride begins in Russia in the 1880s, when Minna Losk, a 16-year-old orphan, signs up to become a mail-order bride. After the death of her father, Minna worked for a while as a maid for a once-wealthy woman. Now, […]

Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the WestDorothy Wickenden304 pages, hardcover: $26.Scribner, 2011. “We did not want strays. We had serious matrimonial intentions, and we decided that young, pretty schoolteachers would be the best bet of all,” cowboy Ferry Carpenter recollected about his part in the effort to attract “schoolmarms” to […]

Lime CreekJoe Henry160 pages, hardcover: $20.Random House, 2011. Woody Creek, Colo.-based Joe Henry studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with John Irving, but then detoured from writing fiction to work as a rancher, becoming a successful lyricist along the way. Henry’s ravishing first work of fiction, Lime Creek, must have been inspired by the Western […]

Open Spaces: Voices from the NorthwestPenny Harrison, ed. 252 pages, softcover: $22.50.University of Washington Press, 2011. I read Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest over two weeks, setting it down still open so that its pages made a neat tent on my coffee table, returning to it over morning coffee, between garden chores, after dinner […]

New California Writing: 2011Gayle Wattawa, ed. 320 pages, softcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. Most anthologies possess a ready-made but sometimes narrow audience. Readers come to these single-subject, multi-authored books with an already established connection and desire to know more. What, then, does a book focused on California offer to those who live outside the Golden State? Plenty, […]

The Barbarian Nurseries: A NovelHéctor Tobar422 pages, hardcover: $27.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Los Angeles Times columnist Héctor Tobar’s ferocious new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries, deftly and convincingly plunges us into the heated national debate on undocumented immigration. Araceli Ramirez, a single woman from Mexico City, works as the live-in housekeeper for Maureen Thompson and […]

Doc Mary Doria Russell 394 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2011. Versatile novelist Mary Doria Rusell’s captivating reimagining of the life of Doc Holliday ends before the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, that eternal wellspring for Western novels and movies. In her new book, Doc, Russell sees Holliday as more than a gambler and […]

What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the WorldBy Sarah Juniper Rabkin173 pages, softcover: $15.Juniper Lake Press, 2011. Twenty-some years ago, University of California, Santa Cruz, writing professor Sarah Juniper Rabkin banished us from the classroom and told us to write outside, under a redwood. The assignment left a lasting […]

The Sisters BrothersPatrick DeWitt325 pages, hardcover: $24.99.HarperCollins, 2011. Although it’s set during the Gold Rush era, Oregon author Patrick DeWitt’s second novel, The Sisters Brothers, is modern Western noir at its finest. The notorious brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters work as professional hit men. Eli, the narrator, is the good-natured “fat one.” Charlie, a merciless […]

Honyocker Dreams: Montana MemoriesDavid Mogen227 pages, hardcover: $21.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Colorado writer David Mogen grew up along Montana’s Hi-Line, just below the Canadian border and east of the Rockies, as his father moved the family from one small town to the next. Honyocker Dreams begins with Mogen’s return to the Hi-Line many years […]

Jesse’s Ghost: A NovelFrank Bergon224 pages, hardcover: $20.Heyday, 2011. “The story of how I came to kill my best friend keeps pressing on my brain like a bad dream so I can feel it, but I can’t remember it whole.” So begins Jesse’s Ghost, the account of a man’s attempt to understand a murder he […]

The changes seem to happen overnight: Even under the stifling lid of late-summer days, September’s dusk begins to come on cool, its mornings curling at the edges with damp chill like the pages of a book. Along the ditches and river, the cottonwood leaves are first to drop, scattering the ground with gold. Tea becomes […]

Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness ExplorerDavid Roberts416 pages, hardcover: $25.Broadway, 2011. Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing AfterlifePhilip L. Fradkin296 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of California Press, 2011. There’s nothing like an unsolved disappearance to create an enduring cult hero. Maybe that’s why Amelia Earhart and […]

AssumptionPercival Everett272 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, October. There aren’t nearly enough books set in New Mexico. With its cinematic lighting and uniquely off-kilter characters, the state should grow great novels as plentifully as chiles. Strangely, though, it hasn’t. California author Percival Everett sets out to change that with Assumption, a trilogy of mysteries starring Ogden […]

What You See in the Dark: A NovelManuel Muñoz272 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Algonquin Books, 2011. It’s 1959, and the shiny façade of America’s white culture is beginning to tarnish. Schools are being desegregated and black people are starting to march in the streets of the South. There’s an “unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans” in California […]

The Color of Night Madison Smartt Bell 208 pages, softcover: $15.Vintage Contemporaries, 2011. Dangerous, charismatic leaders with zealous followers haunt Western history, with Jim Jones, the California cult leader responsible for the 1978 Guyana suicides, at the top of the list. In The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell’s 13th novel, the leader is clearly […]