By Sorrow's River
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In this tale of high-spirited and terrifying adventure, set against the background of the West that Larry McMurtry has made his own, By Sorrow’s River is an epic in its own right with the return of the formidable, young Tasmin Berrybender.
At the heart of this third volume of his Western saga remains the beautiful and determined Tasmin Berrybender, now married to the “Sin Killer” and mother to their young son, Monty. By Sorrow’s River continues the Berrybender party’s trail across the endless Great Plains of the West toward Santa Fe, where they intend, those who are lucky enough to survive the journey, to spend the winter. They meet up with a vast array of characters from the history of the West: Kit Carson, the famous scout; Le Partezon, the fearsome Sioux war chief; two aristocratic Frenchmen, whose eccentric aim is to cross the Great Plains by hot air balloon; a party of slavers; a band of raiding Pawnee; and many other astonishing characters who prove, once again, that the rolling, grassy plains are not, in fact, nearly as empty of life as they look. Most of what is there is dangerous and hostile, even when faced with Tasmin’s remarkable, frosty sangfroid. She is one of the strongest and most interesting of Larry McMurtry’s characters, and she stands at the center of this powerful and ambitious novel of the West.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this third volume of McMurtry's Berrybender Narratives, Lord Berrybender and his obnoxious, sniveling brood are, surprisingly, still alive on the dangerous Great Plains of Wyoming and Colorado. The wry story of mountainman adventure and European stupidity, set in the 1830s, is just as wacky and gruesome as its predecessors, Sin Killer and The Wandering Hill. Lord Berrybender is a pompous, lecherous, drunken, one-legged English aristocrat on a hunting expedition in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Surrounded by his four willful and opinionated daughters, inept servants and a haughty mistress, he is protected by an accompanying group of unwashed mountainmen and trappers. His eldest daughter, the vulgar and loudmouthed Tasmin, is married to Indian fighter Jim Snow, aka Sin Killer, and their marital relations are anything but blissful. In this installment, the hunting party slowly travels from its winter camp in the north, southward toward Santa Fe, on a journey filled with seduction, infidelity, short tempers, heat, thirst, Indian attacks and ever more lusty copulation. The sudden and unlikely arrival of two European journalists in a hot air balloon brings more tragic comedy to the prairie soap opera; other irritants include a smallpox epidemic, a mysterious Indian who cuts off the ears of sleeping white men and a murderously insane Mexican army captain. McMurtry's Europeans are all idiots, while the Indians and mountainmen, including Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick and Hugh Glass, are portrayed as honorable men. The Berrybender clan is so annoying one wishes they would all be massacred by the Indians, but enough of them survive to ensure there will be plenty of Berrybenders to kill off in the next installment. One can only hope.
