Annother Kid story BS mostly ( )

This is another book I got from the Amazon Vine program. It sounded interesting; though not of the type of book I usually read. I was sorely disappointed in it.

It is very rare that I stop in the middle of a book. Unfortunately I had to stop reading this one. I knew I was in for trouble when I had problems getting through the first intro page. Then as I read about Billy's escape in the following chapter I decided that maybe the book would get better as we started to hear about Billy's history. Well it didn't.

Every page of this book was a struggle for me. I had trouble keeping all the names and places straight. When the characters were speaking to each other I had trouble figuring out who was saying what. I was even having trouble keeping events straight. I tried to look at the writing style as being stylized to fit in with the era it was representing, but in the end I think the writing was just bad. I kept pushing on in hopes that at some point this book would gel for me and make more sense. I finally admitted defeat around page 70 and, rubbing my eyes and head in frustration, gave up.

I have too many good books to read to waste my time on this. On the back it lists other books that this author has written and I wonder if those books are better. I am still trying to figure out how this book is getting published. I really intensely disliked it. The chapter with John Tunstall's letters was kind of interesting, it gave you a glimpse into the era. I thought maybe at that point I could get through this book, then it was back to difficult to read, cobbled together events.

I was sorely disappointed. Maybe if I was really into this genre I would have more interest and sympathy for this book. For now I am left trying to figure out what to do with it. I think it might get recycled. ( )

One of my fellow LTers (Kasthu) wrote that she got to page 29 of this novel by John Vernon before giving up in frustration. I'm afraid I wasn't even that successful: page 19 was the breaking point for me.

And it's a darn shame, because I sure wanted to like this book. I love history, and I love stories about cowboys and the Old West, but this book manages to turn one of the most thrilling legends of American folklore into a dry, confusing, mundane tale.

As a rule, I don't mind POV changes within a book, but it needs to be done well. The shifts should be clearly noted, and there should be enough of a difference in tone between the various "voices" to make it easy for the reader to adjust. The first two chapters alternate a third-person omniscient narrator with a first-person narrator, and it. Just. Doesn't. Work. I get that those Old West fellas were laconic cowboy types, but Sheriff Pat Garrett seems to be on tranquilizers.

It was the sheriff's chapter that did me in, sadly: He was describing to some barmates what Billy the Kid (his former pal turned nemesis) was really like, and it just about put me to sleep. Somehow, I don't think that's the intended effect when you're talking about one of the most notorious outlaws of the Wild Wild West.

I guess I'll just stick with Marty Robbins' classic song version of the "Billy the Kid" story. ( )

I only got to page 29, where I stopped reading this novel—partly in confusion, partly in frustration. I was in confusion, because the point of view switched abruptly, without any warning. In fact, I got halfway through Garrett’s chapter before realizing that the POV had changed. And, by the way, whose POV was it in the first chapter? I was frustrated because the premise of the book was good; I just didn’t think Vernon delivered it in a way that makes sense to the reader. In the end, the author makes a normally intriguing premise seem banal and flat.

I don’t know; maybe I’m a bit of a dolt and don’t get what the author was trying to do. But I still stand by my assertion that Lucky Billy is a pretty uninspired and uninspiring novel. ( )

To guys of a certain age, Billy the Kid is still a legendary figure because, at one time or the other, almost all of us strapped on our six-shooters and pretended to be him. He looked so cool in western movies and television shows that we didn’t care that he was really one of life’s bad guys. We just wanted to be him.

John Vernon’s Lucky Billy, although a fictional account, is a much more realistic version of the life and times of Billy Bonney than the ones told in those old movies and TV shows. It deals primarily with Billy’s days as a New Mexico Regulator in the Lincoln County War of 1878, a power struggle between wealthy Irish ranchers and Englishman John Tunstall who operated a large general store in the county. The conflict turned violent soon enough and John Tunstall was murdered by a posse loyal to the ranchers. Billy, who had actually started out working as a hired gun for the Irish ranchers who dominated the area before Tunstall’s arrival there, had by the time of Tunstall’s murder sworn his loyalty to Tunstall and, as a Regulator, he desperately wanted to avenge the murder of his friend.

The Lincoln County War was a messy affair by any standard upon which it can be retrospectively judged. It was not easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and both sides seemed more than willing to shoot first and ask questions later. Local law enforcement was corrupt enough not to be trusted, and even the army troops stationed in Lincoln County threw their weight behind the ranchers and watched as what was left of the Tunstall group was routed in a battle in which the home they were hiding in was set afire. Billy Bonney killed several people during the various confrontations and his reputation is largely based on what happened in New Mexico.

Billy the Kid was never to leave New Mexico and, in fact, died there when he was gunned down without warning by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881. Garrett himself was to meet his own end at the hands of a murderer in 1908.

Lucky Billy is not an easy book to read because of the way that author John Vernon has cobbled together his story by telling it from several points-of-view and by jumping backward and forward in time from one chapter to the next. Vernon also reproduces letters and legal documents (based on actual documents) that are often difficult to follow and he seems prone to over-long descriptive passages that add little to his story or its atmosphere.

I found Lucky Billy to be a difficult book to read, at times, because I had such a hard time getting into its rhythm, that state of mind that allows the reader to absorb and enjoy a book at an almost effortless pace. That never really happened for me with this one. Vernon, on the other hand, does do a fine job when it comes to the “action scenes” in Lucky Billy, describing them in a vivid and exciting way that had me racing from one page to the next to see who would survive the violence. I do have mixed feelings about the last few pages of the book, in which Vernon describes that final encounter between Garrett and the Kid, because of a bit of bizarre behavior that Vernon attributes to Garrett after Billy has been stripped to be prepared for his coffin. So as not to spoil the effect of that particular scene, I will only say that I found the behavior to be both jarring and disturbing and, more importantly, unnecessary.

Rated at: 3.0 ( )