jaeleslie

As I mentioned I had finally finished Carmen Dog, after taking much longer with it than I usually would with a novel of that length. It just didn't suck me in the way some do. As for instance did the same author's Ledoyt, which I have just finished this morning in about three days all told, maybe it was two. I sat on the sofa this morning and finished the entire second half of it, smiling or laughing and with tears running down my face in a couple episodes, and then when it was done, checked the online library catalog and drove immediately to the public library to take out Leaping Man Hill which is a sequel even though I have read it before. I don't remember it nearly well enough, and want to stay with those people a while longer. Unfortunately the library was closed. So here I am instead to tell you about it.

These are called Western novels, only I think because they are set in the west. They are not action adventure type novels, although plenty of action and riproaring adventures occur. Ledoyt is told largely through the journal of a young girl living on a ranch, who loves and hates her stepfather, and sometimes does not believe her mother to be really her mother. And then you know how sometimes in close family matters you think What on earth could they be thinking? In this novel you find out exactly what they are thinking. The point of view shifts to the parents, who are much in love. They are kind but terribly damaged people, damaged just in the usual run of human damage, and absolutely true to their period of the early twentieth century, in the things they tell themselves about their own shortcomings and failures and how they view what befalls them. So the story is not only of the young girl making trouble as she grows up, but of the whole family.

Parents sometimes carelessly share their troubles with their children, and sometimes succeed in sheltering them. And with luck they grow up.