Leah Angstman's OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA

I don't always immediately wish a novel I've been reading to be made into a Major Motion Picture, or even a minor one, but when I do, I really, really do! Such is the case here: Leah Angstman's debut novel, Out Front the Following Sea, set in an America so early they're still bickering over the borders of the 13 colonies, has everything anyone would want from a fun historical romp: kissing, fighting, accusations of witchcraft, more fighting, desperate battles against nature at her worst, bravery and more kissing! 

Furthermore, I demand that Julia Garner dye her hair auburn red and be cast immediately as Angstman's amazing heroine, Ruth Miner, and I swear it's not totally because Garner has achieved fame playing another character named Ruth, that's just a coincidence. But if you love Ruth Langmore in Ozark, imagine her in an adventurous historical romance that up until now we've just had to re-read Louis L'Amour's Sackett and Chantry novels to get -- and in which she is absolutely the hero of the tale.

I'm serious. To call Ruth Miner plucky would be to sell her short. She could go toe to toe with anybody from the Aubrey/Maturin books (though this is set about a century before Jack and Stephen take to the seas), with anybody from the Sackett novels, and very possibly not even get singed, because even the officers in His Majesty's Royal Navy were still pretty superstitious, except for Maturin. Maturin would just fall in love with her, though. Diana who?

As our story begins to unfold, 16-year-old Ruth Miner is living on the bitter edge of starvation or freezing to death, for all that once upon a time her family was respected in the small Dutch-settled coast of what would become New Jersey. Her parents are dead (we don't find out how or why until much later) and she is desperately trying to keep herself and an ailing grandmother alive with less than no help from the community in which she grew up, because they all think she's a witch. No fool, she, she winds up trading on this reputation to get passage on a cargo ship that's soon to make a stop where she's lived her whole life -- by threatening to call down the mother of all curses on the customs officer who is not willing to let her book herself as freight (because passenger berths are way beyond her means).

No sooner is she on board ship than she is causing trouble there, too; the first mate is an old family friend who feels an unspecified sense of obligation to her and also may have a crush; ruthlessly (wink) she uses his feelings against him to keep her safe on a ship full of filthy louts who seem to think that an unmarried woman on board ship is basically community property. The first mate, Owen Townsend, while charming and handsome as the dickens, is barely tolerated on board himself because he is half-French at a time when the mother nations of England and France are at war and their conflicts threaten to spill over into their colonies; even knowing a few words of the French language or possessing books written in French is kind of against the law. Childhood friends who are well aware of the liabilities they pose to one another, they nonetheless team up in the struggle to survive the outbreak of what we know as the French and Indian War.

Along the way, Ruth bullies the local land office in the Connecticut village where she debarks into letting her have an unpromising piece of marsh land abutting the property of the kindly old couple who take her in and have her toiling to fence out, stone by stone. Soon she's not only getting the fence built but also building a house for herself, growing a few crops in her marsh, and has begun a tentative but promising friendship with a semi-outcast member of the remnants of the Pequod nation, whose land the white settlers have, of course, appropriated from them at gunpoint.

It all sounds a bit far-fetched and Mary Sue-ish, doesn't it? But trust me, you're not going to care. This book gallops along at a breathtaking pace and it's all fascinating and fun. Plus, Angstrom, whom I believe is a professional historian by trade, knows her way around a Dutch-style fluyt and writes a mean combat scene aboard one:

He leaped onto the3 fallen foremast and felt the throb in his thigh, then swooped from above with his dagger downward, driving it between a pirate's shoulderblades.* The pirate went down without seeing what hit him. Own retracted the blade and swiped it across the neck of the next advancing attacker, before stepping to thte side of the man's descending sword, leaving the falling edge to lodge itself into the planks of the deck. the opponent fell forward, his throat opening like a sluice gate, a stream of crimson onto the floorboards.

I mean, who doesn't want to see that on the big screen? Or at least your big TV in the rumpus room?

Seriously, it's been a while since I had this much plain old fun reading a novel. And there's room for a sequel, right? Right??? Please?

I mean, how many freaking Sackett novels got cranked out over the years? And the women were mostly just trophies in those. In the Ruth and Owen adventures, both of them get to be badasses. 

*Of course there are pirates. 

Louis L'Amour's THE DAYBREAKERS

The Daybreakers marks the point where the Sackett novels start to become Westerns, as Barnabas Sackett's latest round of descendants finally get tired of squabbling with lesser men in Tennessee and decide to strike out west to some farther, bluer mountains: the Rockies.

But first, New Mexico, newly added to the United States' territory and thus the target for arrogant jerk land speculators who think that the settlers of Spanish descent who have already been ranching there don't count as Americans -- don't count as people -- and so the land they've been working for a generation or three is actually up for grabs. Soon our Sackett boys, good lookin', sweet talkin' Orrin and our narrator-hero Tye ("the fastest gun alive"), meet up with the most arrogant jerk of them all, one Jonathan Pritts, whose surname should really end with a "ck" instead of "tts" if you know what I mean, but who also has a pretty blond daughter, Laura. Uh oh.

While Orrin is chasing Laura, who reminds Tye of a difficult horse he once knew, Tye meets up with a classy Spanish family, a grandfather and pretty granddaughter, Drusilla, whom Tye falls for almost as fast as Orrin fell for Laura. Uh oh again.

So conflict between the brothers seems inevitable as the Anglo newcomers and the Spanish landowners prepare to square off, but hey, these are Sacketts. And there is a lot more going on than just a land grab.

For on their way to meeting their lady loves, the Sackett boys join up with a cowboy outfit and hatch a plan to round up all the stray cattle that are wandering wild in Colorado, getting fat and juicy on mountain grass and clean water. And the leader of said outfit is an autodidact of sorts, Tom Sunday, who reads the Greek and Roman classics at night by the campfire and teaches Orrin and Tye how to read on similarly high-minded stuff that gives birth to ideas of making the West a civilized place where children can be raised safely and big D Democracy can flourish. What a guy!

Soon Orrin, already gifted with the gab and all the charisma you could care to call on, is dreaming big dreams about a future as a politician, little knowing that Tom's ambitions have always lay this way. Oops.

This is short, taut, tense story-telling at its best, but also its hokiest, which only adds to its charm. The Sackett family produce heroes of the kind that have become thoroughly unfashionable; there isn't a brooding anti-hero in the bunch. These guys are honest, forthright, capable, daring, brave, and romantic and loyal even when forces seem to conspire to drive a wedge between them. Both of them have to use their gifts of gab and gunfire to survive one fateful day when all that conflict comes to a head.

All in just 200-some pages. All because Orrin and Tye just wanted to do what these dudes did in this terrifyingly catchy but decidedly not cowboy song:

Louis L'Amour's RIDE THE RIVER

I'll admit to having put off picking up this one, even though so far the Sackett books have pretty much been a sausage fest (for all that each one of them is about the winning of a wife as awesome as each novel's hero deserves), partly because I wasn't sure how well Louis L'Amour could really do a female voice, mostly because it seemed from the opening paragraphs, that his version of said female voice was in backwoods dialect, and I'm still getting over the wounds dealt to me on that score by one Mr. Stephen King (see the footnote to my reaction to fan unfavorite Wizard and Glass). So, though I've been loving the Sackett novels as nice, somewhat wistful entertainment, I was not eager to plunge into Ride the River as I had been into its predecessors.

I'm glad I finally got over my aversion, though. Fans of The Hunger Games and whatnot take note: Echo Sackett is the spiritual ancestor of Katniss Everdeen and lots of other plucky young tomboyish heroines (Kaylee from Firefly and Amy Shaftoe from Cryptonomicon come to mind as well).. As in Echo was huntin' and killin' and feedin' her family long, long before la Everdeen volunteered as a replacement tribute in some young adult fiction. Except Echo uses guns. And an "Arkansas toothpick." And, yes, the power of her last name.

Ride the River takes place some two hundred years after the last Sackett story. Echo is a descendent of Kin-Ring, one of the the heroes of The Warrior's Path, and so also presumably of his stupendously badass wife Diana. Moreover, she is the youngest of those descendents, which means she's about to come into a special legacy. For back in the days of Barnabas Sackett, Barnabas had a great friend. And said great friend did well for himself. And felt that he owed so much to Barnabas that he instructed his heirs to make sure that if his line ever died out, all the money and a special puzzle box with a secret inside would go to the youngest descendent of Barnabas' first-born son, Kin-Ring.

Only problem is, Echo lives in Tennessee, and the lawyer working the inheritance case is in Philadelphia. So to the big bad city goes our little paragon, only to learn that the lawyer is more than a little crooked, and he's not the only bad guy after her windfall.

Enter the Chantry family, heroes of another Louis L'Amour series (of which I've only read one book, Fair Blows the Wind, and that reading was back in my early teens). These writers just can't resist the urge to link all their series and characters together, eh? And here it seems a tad gratuitous, but what the hell. Finian Chantry, octagenarian lawyer who can still kick ass, proves himself a more than worthy descendant of Tatton, and so, eventually, does his strapping (and yes, handsome) nephew Dorian, whom he sends after Echo to keep her safe on her journey home with a carpetbag full of gold.

But this is Echo, and she is a Sackett, so who do you think winds up rescuing/taking care of/worrying about whom? Even as she "sparks" on him.

But so basically this novel is fluff, but it's enjoyable fluff. I'm relieved to discover that later Sackett novels will take up with earlier generations again as a Sackett in the years after the War of 1812 is a bit boring even if she is dinky and cute and never misses with a rifle or a pistol and isn't above clocking you with the butt if you get into close range. I wouldn't mess with her, sho nuff.

Louis L'Amour's JUBAL SACKETT

Each of Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels becomes my new favorite as I read along, but I'm starting to see a bit of a pattern forming of which I might tire. That pattern being that each novel is, in no small part, about its chosen Sackett's quest for a wife with whom to make more Sacketts to be waiting there to greet the rest of the white folks when they finally get around to settling the interior of the North American continent.

So far, though, there is plenty of variety within that narrative, and Jubal Sackett has the most interesting twist on that basic plot, in that our man Jubal, the youngest son of dynastic founder Barnabas Sackett, really doesn't think he's looking for a wife when he takes off wandering, itching to see unknown lands and explore mountains farther west than those his father had once itched to explore. And explore he does, for a while, in the company of a native companion he picks up, a Kickapoo called Keokotah, who feels similarly ill at ease hanging around his own people -- he met and became fascinated by an Englishmen when he was just a lil' Kickapoo.

Soon the pair encounter a Mississippi River tribe, the Natchez (often referred to, in this book, as "Natchee"), who are having a bit of a territory crisis, and also a crisis of leadership. Their chief is dying, their territory being encroached on by other, stronger tribes, and their medicine man has heard of the legendary Sackett family and what a bunch of stand-up guys they are, for white men, and would Jubal mind heading west to find their exploration party that was sent out a while ago to find a new place for them to live? Oh, and find their crown princess, Itchakomi, and ask her to come home and lead her people since the chief is dying and all?

Well, Jubal and Keokotah were going that way, anyway, so why not?

Oh, by the way, there's this half-breed Natchez jerk who thinks he's going to marry Itchakomi and take power among us, and like we said, he's really a jerk and we'd rather he didn't but it's really up to her whom she marries because she's that important and all. Anyway, he's probably going to be trying to hunt her down and he already doesn't like you because he's that guy over there that tried to pick a fight, mmmkay?

Sure, whatever.

Of course, we all know who is really going to get to marry Itchakomi, but it's still fun watching Jubal be the last one to realize it, especially since he spends most of the first half of the novel just trying to find her out in the great unknown and mostly unexplored wilds between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Which is really quite a vast territory in which to be trying to find anyone and anything. But duh, this is like no spoiler at all, he finds her. Just as his brother found Carrie and Diana in the Caribbean last novel. Just as Keokotah, from whom Jubal becomes separated when he chooses to seek out some caves (maybe Mammoth in Kentucky?*), still manages to find him even when Jubal is unexpectedly hampered and delayed from making their agreed rendezvous. These people are awfully, awfully good at finding each other, these Louis L'Amour characters. Like Dickensianly good. I find this hard to swallow at times, but, yannow, Romance.

What really sold this book to me as my new favorite Sackett novel, though, is the scenery porn and attendant displays of survival skills in solitude Jubal constantly displays. To read Louis L'Amour (for me anyway) is to come to resent the year of one's birth; mine was a good 150 years too late**; I am forever deprived of the sight of the country through which Jubal travels as it was before it got covered in pavement and gas stations and tract housing and big box stores. L'Amour is a pretty good nature writer, and gives Jubal a unique and lyrical narrative voice that marks out his mystical, solitary character as very different from his brothers Yance and Kin-Ring, and from his father Barnabas.

I have one pet peeve though, and it's both insignificant and hugely annoying. For no good reason except to make sure we know that Itchakomi digs Jubal, two-thirds of the way through the book we get a single chapter from her first person perspective. And it's all about her romantic dilemma of how to make him "see" her without sacrificing her pride or losing face. And then it's back to Jubal's narration for the rest of the novel. This seems a clumsy and amateurish thing to do in a book that otherwise flows so beautifully (and I assure you, willfully blind as Jubal is, there are plenty of hints for us readers to pick up to clue us in to Itchakomi's feelings. Really, we spend quite a bit of time watching Jubal's mental gymnastics and contortions via which he preserves his ignorance of the fact that he and Itchakomi are in lurve. It's quite amusing). I hope it's not a sign of things to come, I really do.

But for now, I'm still on board, especially since the next novel, Ride the River, has my curiosity already; its protagonist is female. Can L'Amour handle that well? His silly Itchakomi chapter argues against the idea, but we'll see. We'll see.

*Part of these novels is working out where our characters are, based on purely geographical clues; no modern names for anything are used in these novels. Thus the Mississippi is "the Great River" and the Rockies are "the Shining Mountains" but the more southerly part is already called the Sangre de Christos because the Spaniards who so named them are already there and using the name at the time of this novel.

**Funny because, as mostly a science fiction fan, I'm more likely to grouse about being born 150 years too early. There's just no pleasing me, I guess.

Louis L'Amour's THE WARRIOR'S PATH #OneBookAtATime

It's a strange experience for a Wyoming girl, raised on Wyoming history but not so much U.S. history, to read historical fiction in which the east coast is the frontier. Strange and pretty fascinating. I know that later Sackett novels will bring me to more familiar territory, but right now, right now the most settled part of the United States feels downright exotic, even romantic, in this third novel, The Warrior's Path.

Man, is there a lot going on in this little book.

As we rejoin the Sackett family, its first American-born generation has reached adulthood and started getting married. Founding patriarch Barnabas, he of the antique coin find in the English Fens of Cambridgeshire who started it all, is now dead, cut down in his late prime in an honorable fight with some Seneca warriors. Wife Abigail, she of the wild seafaring life until Barnabas convinced her to go pioneering with him, has taken their son Brian (who would be a law student) and daughter Noelle back to England to get some civilizin', but their other sons, Yance and Kin-Ring*, ah, that's who we're following for this here novel (they had another son, Jubal, but we'll get his story in some other book. I have a feeling he's more of a full-on Grizzly Adams type than his brothers, who just refer to him from time to time as a wanderer).

The Sacketts and their friends have established a nice little mini-colony in the Carolinas, befriended some natives, be-foed others, and are enjoying their lives of hunting and fishing and farming. Yance has married a nice young lady from the Plymouth colony up north, somewhat against those Puritans' wishes, and its through the circumstances of his wedding that the story gets started -- though the story is really Kin-Ring's.

Word comes via a dying native that Yance's 12-year-old sister-in-law, Carrie, and another woman, Diana Macklin, have been kidnapped by some bad natives and Yance's in-laws aren't satisfied with their community's half-hearted efforts to get the girls back. Diana is a bit of a wild one, it seems -- whip-smart, independent, outdoorsy, knowledgeable about herbs and animals, literate, skeptical, all those things good Puritan girls aren't -- and no one seems too concerned at her loss. As for the little girl, ah, well, she shouldn't have been hanging out with Diana anyway.

Well, of course our Sackett boys spring into action. And quickly determine that 1. Diana and Carrie are not the first young ladies to disappear from their settlement, 2. The other disappeared girls have also been uppity types like Diana is and Carrie is likely to grow up to be and 3. It wasn't actually Indians what took 'em.

I love that L'Amour loves strong female characters almost as much as he loves subtly skewering the people who don't appreciate them. His princesses aren't entirely self-rescuing, but they come awfully close, really just needing to borrow masculine brawn on occasion to make their brainy schemes go (and satisfy some confining social norms). Such is Diana, who has already taken her fate into her own hands by the time the Sacketts locate her, and especially Adele, whom Kin-Ring meets in Jamaica (see, I said there's a lot going on in this little novel) as he tracks down the white slavers who are the real culprits in these abductions -- slavers who are not only profiting from the trade in pretty white girls, but are also doing their hometowns a favor by getting rid of uppity women that can't quite successfully be persecuted as witches. At least not yet.** Diana and Adele are never quite fleshed out as whole characters, and are definitely seen wholly through male eyes, but these male eyes appreciate the ladies for more than just their looks and their cooking and their ability to make more male with eyes. Sackett men want brainy, educated, can-do women, and if they're pretty, that's just a bonus.

So of the Sackett novels I've read so far, this one is my favorite, but I suspect they'll keep getting better. I'm pretty sure L'Amour's small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri would be real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Really, the only flaw here is some weird narrative switcheroos that L'amour made earlier in the novel. About 90% of the story is told in the first person with Kin-Ring as narrator, but a few scenes from which he is absent are told from Diana's third person perspective, which is fine if a bit sloppy. When they first meet up, though, L'Amour inexplicably switches from one narration to the other in the middle of a scene, just for a few paragraphs, which is jarring and came across as downright amateurish. Since this book dates back to the days when major publishing houses generally made an effort at editing, it's all the more surprising to encounter here. But hey, even the greats screw up sometimes.

And L'Amour is great.

*I do not understand the naming of this character at all. Anyone who knows WTS this guy's name is supposed to refer to, enlighten me, please!

**This story takes place a little while before the Great Witch Craze really caught on in North America.

100 Books #109 - Louis L'Amour's TO THE FAR BLUE MOUNTAINS

..."There is game."
"Poaching?"
I smiled. "There are no lords there to bespeak the deer or the hare, William. There is enough for all."

I love this exchange between Barnabas Sackett, gonnabe American pioneer, and the man he's leaving behind to work his tiny plot of land in England's famous fens. Neither can believe that the other wants what he does. William is happy to cut rushes and grow what crops he can on the tillable bits of Barnabas' inheritance; Barnabas wants to be in on the ground floor of history's greatest Do-Over. It's a moment that all but sings with romance and makes the reader want to have been there to sail off with Barnabas, even though that reader knows that yesterday's frontier became today's suburban franchise ghetto and, while there is actually enough for all, the dream of all getting to share in it is far from realized.

But it's a great reminder, a book like this, that the American Experiment really was and still is one. People who knew what had become of hundreds and thousands of years of hereditary aristocracy and hierarchies that might as well have been castes wanted to try something different, but they had to make it up as they went along. And we still are, today. We may be disappointed that this country seems not to be living up to its early promise, but we set ourselves some pretty lofty goals, for which Plan A might not have been the best. Plan B? Plan C? Plan D? Plan E? The important thing is to keep trying.

But that's not what To the Far Blue Mountains is about, of course. All that experimentation is far in the future for America and the Sacketts. First, Barnabas has to gain a proper foothold on the continent and survive and have kids.* But even before that, he has to get out of England, where people in high places have come to think he is a very bad man (some even think he's hiding the Crown Jewels**, which they think he found with the gold coins that started him on his path to independence in Sackett's Land). Which is to say that Barnabas spends the first chunk of this novel (again) in what I like to call "Doctor Who jeopardy"***. There many, many novels after this one, and they're about his descendants, so we kind of know he's not going to be hanged or murdered or anything. Yawn.

Again, this is the stuff of Romance, not history or historical fiction, but fun nonetheless. Swirling capes and salutes, daring escapes, audacious seizures of ships -- all that's missing is D'Artagnan, really, but our Barnabas, so legendary that even weird old men in Welsh shacks know his name without an introduction, makes a pretty fair substitute.

And while he's got him a wife all picked out, the beautiful and tough Abigail (who fought off pirates off the coast of India when she was just 13, apparently), his female companion for a lot of the best bits of this novel would make him a fine match, too. Oh, if you don't love Lila, Abigail's maidservant who got left behind when Abigail and her father sailed for America but who bulls her way into chasing after her with Barnabas, you don't love strong women. Lila is physically imposing, plies a mean sword, cooks a fine supper on no notice and with whatever crap ingredients are on hand, and is fiercely loyal. If Barnabas is larger than life, and he certainly is that, Lila is even larger, a paragon of rough country virtue and can-do-it attitude.

It's a pity that she more or less disappears, for huge chunks of the novel, but this is Barnabas' story, and he's got a lot going on. Like fighting off pirates. Like fighting off the urge to become one himself. Like darting in and out of English ports under the noses of his enemies so he can sell the spars and furs and potash (oh my!) he has collected in the New World and buy clothing and beer and seed corn and whatnot. Like fighting some Indians and befriending others. Like building and rebuilding his fort in Virginia. Like impregnating his wife. Like scenery appreciation.

His is a fun ride on which to be along, and no mistake. Onward to the next book, soon, which appears to concern his first son, the improbably named Kin Ring Sackett.

*So far no plan for dynasty founding has succeeded by avoiding that step.

**Lost in a flash flood by King John's baggage train in the early 13th century.

***As in the way episodes of that show may dangle its title character over any number of cliffs but the fact that the show is his and that he is known to have many future incarnations makes any episodic endings in which he is in danger kind of laughable when one watches, say, Jon Pertwee's turn in the role back in the 1960s.

100 Books #104 - Louis L'Amour's SACKETT'S LAND

You've got to admire, or at least smile at, this founding document of the fictional Sackett dynasty, not only for its main character's, Barnabas Sackett's* minute consciousness of the fact that he is a founder of a dynasty, but for how he (again, very consciously) goes about doing so. For while, as his companion Jubain tells him early in the story "some of the great families of the world were founded with nothing but a sword and a strong right arm," Barnabas is all about establishing something other than just another coat of arms for his descendants to polish and admire and lord it over the neighbors over in Britain.

He knows there's more out there in the newly discovered Americas. And he's going to do something about that.

But first! I love that what really starts Barnabas moving towards Illustrious Ancestor status is the discovery of a small cache of ancient coins, which leads to the discovery of a small cadre of people who are devoted to acquiring and studying them. So thus L'Amour's fictional exploration of where the settlers who took over and exploited the American West came from is starting with people who are interested in exploring where they came from, all the way back to the pre-Roman Iceni.

I'm reminded a bit of Edward Rutherford, in a way, he of the 10,000 year story-line. But that's not really what L'Amour is up to. He, like Barnabas, is chiefly interested in the past as a springboard into the future; those coins Barnabas finds are worth a life-changing amount of money, which would make for a pretty interesting story right there, but it wouldn't really make for a L'Amour story, would it?

For a real plot-propeller, L'Amour turns to the good old angry aristocrat. The day Barnabas brings his coins to a local antiquarian enthusiast also winds up being the day he witnesses one doing something dumb in front of a pretty lady, and if there's one thing such types hate more than the Laughter of Women, its having witnesses when they provoke it. The fact that said aristocrat already has reason to hate Barnabas (unknown to Barnabas at the time) doesn't help.

Barnabas has to Get Out of Dodge. Which he does, though not in the way that he planned.

What I like best about Barnabas, and this first Sackett novel, is that this Big Damn Hero could very plainly accomplish his goals by following in his mercenary father's footsteps; Barnabas is "as strong as two men" and his father taught him every sword-fighting trick in the book.

But Barnabas is determined to succeed by his wits instead. Even if sometimes it seems a bit perverse of him to do so.

It's as if Jayne Cobb decided to knuckle down and master business administration. Who wouldn't want to read that? And who wouldn't want to know what happens next?

*And as a matter of fact, no, I was not, in fact, able to stop thinking of Barnabas Collins through this, and yes, kept expecting him to meet a vampire on his journeys. Why do you ask?