Boones Lick

McMurtry, Larry

ISBN 10: 0743510240 ISBN 13: 9780743510240

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2000

Synopsis

Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's triumphant return to the kind of story that made him famous -- an enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century West.

McMurtry brings his unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius to the Cecil family's arduous journey from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen year old Shay describes the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him.

The family sets out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather and hostile Indians as they go. With them are Shay's siblings G.T., Neva and Baby Marcy, Shay's uncle Seth, his Granpa Crackenthorpe, and Mary Margaret's beautiful half-sister Rose. During their journey they pick up a bare-footed priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days, and persuade them to come along.

Boone's Lick is high adventure, a perfect Western tale and a moving love story -- it is vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the West and his unrivalled eye for the telling detail.

About this title

Review:

Master storyteller Larry McMurtry unfurls a short, bright banner of a book following the fortunes of the Cecil family as they travel from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to the Western frontier. Though the story is narrated by her oldest son, 15-year-old Shay, the real hero of the book is Mary Margaret, the mother. Her husband, Dick, has left her and their four children in Boone's Lick while he seeks his fortunes in the West. Mary Margaret lives contentedly with the children and Dick's brother, Seth, until one day she decides she's had enough of playing the estranged wife and packs up the entire household. And so the Cecil family leaves their little town (where Wild Bill Hickok makes a cameo appearance) and travels by wagon to Wyoming, accompanied along the way by a fat Québecois priest and a Shoshone. They do find Dick, and they also arrive in Wyoming just in time for the 1866 Fetterman Massacre.

McMurtry writes with an ease that younger writers would do well to emulate. Here Seth fights off an ambush of white trash dastards:

Uncle Seth fired again and a third horse went down--though just saying it went down would be to put it too mildly. The third horse turned a complete somersault. Its rider flew off about thirty feet, after which he didn't move.

"'It's rare to see a horse turn a flip like that,' Uncle Seth observed." That cool "observed" gives an idea of the book's wry, pervasive humor. But there's more here than shooting and quipping: McMurtry's wagon full of frustrated Missourians makes a fine narrative vehicle: we get a first-hand account of the Native American wars; we get the perspective of the women left behind in the opening of the West; we get a wagon's-eye view of the hard journey of the settlers; and, ultimately, we get an insightful family romance. All that, and scalpings too. --Claire Dederer

About the Author:

Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is the author of twenty-three novels, two collections of essays, two memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays. He is the editor of a collection of short stories of the modern West. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0743510240
• ISBN 13: 9780743510240
• Binding: Audio Cassette