So Brave, Young, and Handsome
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4.4 • 22 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“An almost perfect novel” of yearning, adventure, and redemption in the dying days of the Old West from the bestselling author of Peace Like a River (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
Minnesota, 1915. With success long behind him, writer, husband, and father Monte Becket has lost his sense of purpose . . . until he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale. Plagued by guilt over abandoning his wife two decades ago, Hale is heading back West in search of absolution. And he could use some company on the journey.
As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Becket agrees to travel into Hale’s past, leaving behind his own family for an adventure that will test the depth of his loyalties and morals, and the strength of his resolve. As they flee the relentless former Pinkerton Detective who’s been hunting Hale for years, Becket falls ever further into the life of an outlaw—perhaps to the point of no return.
With its smooth mix of romanticism and gritty reality, So Brave, Young, and Handsome examines one ordinary man’s determination to risk everything in order to understand what it’s all worth, in “an old-fashioned, swashbuckling, heroic Western . . . [An] adventure of the heart and mind (The Washington Post Book World).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An inviting voice guides readers through this expansive saga of redemption in the early 20th-century West and gives a teeming vitality to a period often represented with stock phrases and stock characters. Novelist Monte Becket isn't a terribly distinguished figure; his first and only published work hit five years before the story's start and he is about to reclaim his job at a smalltown Minnesota post office when he meets Glendon Hale, a former outlaw who is traveling to Mexico to find his estranged wife. He persuades Becket to join him, and the two set off on a long journey peopled with sharply carved characters (among them a Pinkerton thug tracking down Glendon) and splendid surprises. As Monte's narration continues, the tale veers away from Monte's artistic struggle and becomes an adventure story. The progress has its listless moments, but Enger crafts scenes so rich you can smell the spilled whiskey and feel the grit.
Customer Reviews
Not Quite
This book has a narrator whose motives aren’t clear but whose behavior becomes predictable. I know that the man who wrote Peace.Like A River might well have a lesser debut novel, and this is so. These characters are not quite realized and the book seems not quite finished (and the plot not quite worked out). I plan on reading Peace Like A River again.