Review by Booklist Review
Twisted Tree, South Dakota, may be small, but it's large enough to foment epic conflicts as Meyers, building on the emotional plentitude found in The Light in the Crossing (1999), sets in motion finely realized characters and explores our complex attachments to place and family. Carson, a loner known for his horse-training skills, reluctantly agrees to work for Magnus, a wealthy, land-grabbing neighbor, then gets dangerously involved with Magnus' young wife. Earl Walks Alone, a mathematically gifted Lakota high-school student, dreams of a college scholarship and escape from Twisted Tree and is surprised to find himself befriending a German exchange student, Willi, who seeks to redress his dark and appalling inheritance through immersion in Lakota culture. These three misfits, backed by a terrifically vital cast of secondary characters, eventually conspire to rescue a trio of abused horses, and their good chemistry and wild schemes, played out against the glorious landscape, illuminate much that is intrinsic to human nature. Meyers, imaginative and equally attuned to uniqueness and universality, awakens sorrow, compassion, and wonder in this vivid, covertly metaphysical, and viscerally dramatic novel of tragic cultural legacies, personal valor, and boundary-dispelling revelations. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Meyers's third novel (The River Warren; etc.) is a gorgeously written, exacting exploration of duty and retribution set in dusty rural South Dakota. There's no love lost between horse trainer Carson Fielding and land baron Magnus Yarborough ever since a confident 14-year-old Carson got the better of Magnus in a horse buy. But Carson, now 26, is broke, and Magnus needs someone to train his horses and teach his wife, Rebecca, to ride. Carson and Rebecca fall for each other, and though their relationship remains in the realm of perfectly rendered, unconsummated desire, Magnus becomes convinced they're having an affair. In a bizarre act of revenge, he hides and starves the horses Carson trained. When two teenagers, Lakota math whiz Earl Walks Alone and German exchange student Willi Schubert, discover the abused animals, they plot with Carson to save them; alcoholic Ted Kills Many soon joins the mission. Meyers weaves the folklore and legend of Lakota culture with the tension between ranchers who have worked the land for generations and the greed of those who would take it away from them. His spare dialogue is brilliantly and often comically expressive, and Carson, his taciturn, rational hero, is an original and compelling character. Strong themes of generational responsibility and family history add resonance to this gratifying, very American novel. Agent, Noah Lukeman. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Meyers (The River Warren) sets his second novel in South Dakota, where he teaches English at Black Hills State University. In it, several different lives intersect on the edge of the Sioux reservation when a group of mistreated horses is discovered. Carson Fielding, a horse trainer who lives on a farm that has been in his family for several generations, is hired by wealthy landowner Magnus Yarborough to train said horses and teach Rebecca, his young wife, to ride. When Yarborough suspects that the lessons have led to something more, he takes out his anger on Carson through the horses, setting in motion a series of events that draws together Carson; Earl Walks Alone, a Lakota teenager who discovers the half-starved horses in a secluded pen; and Willi, a German exchange student with a troubled past. Along with another Lakota, Ted Kills Many, they devise a plan to free the animals from the vengeful and controlling Yarborough. A deeply felt tale of family ties and reverence for the land, this work should find a readership well beyond regional collections. Recommended for most public libraries.-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Masterful detail of life on the Plains, in a third novel from Meyers. The author's The River Warren (1998) defied description, by genre or any other way, and this outing is much the same. It starts with a brilliant piece of horse-trading wit, mindful of Faulkner's "Spotted Horses" in The Hamlet. Cocksure 14-year-old Carson Fielding visits rich rancher Magnus Yarborough to buy his first horse, and Magnus foresees a beautiful fleecing. The lad points to a roan, saying, "I don't know if I seen a more worthless animal since I been born." Is this true or not? The reader can't tell--but it's Magnus who gets fleeced. The uppity roan later kills Carson's grandfather and when Carson tells Mom, she suggests calling an ambulance. "I didn't say hurt, Mom. I said dead. He's dead. He's laying out there dead." "You did. Yes. You did say dead . . . But how do you know?" "I know dead, Mom. I've seen dead." "I suppose you have." Faulknerian grim wit? Like Wild Bill, Meyers doesn't let on what fun he has with Carson's stony reasonableness. After graduation, Carson moves into his late grandfather's old house and soon becomes a respected hand with horses, so much so that Magnus hires the unwilling Carson, now 26, to train three horses for him and teach his wife Rebecca how to ride. Carson and Rebecca, who's a year or two older, grow closer and closer. She demands that they drive off onto far reaches of the ranch for their riding lessons. But then Meyers breaks the rules and what you expect to happen doesn't happen. Superb dialogue. And the same irony that emerges from the horse-trading emerges still more deeply from Carson in his climactic verbal face-off with Vaughn, as if about to fleece Vaughn of Rachel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
