The Son

I absolutely recommend this but it's not your typical western and that's part of what makes it valuable.

This book exploded with some of the best writing I've experienced in a long, long time. The pacing was perfect and the characters were just plain wonderful. Relentless, things stayed that way through about 75% of the book. Then, something odd happened.

The writing never slipped, it was still literary gold. But the pacing slowed just enough to throw me off. Then, around 85-90%, the pacing increased to and it felt a bit rushed. These details did not ruin the experience, by any means. It was still a sweeping epic, spanning three generations, against arguably the greatest landscape in contemporary American literature but it lost me.

Like a Cohen Brothers film, I left feeling a bit unresolved, though not in a disappointing way. More in a “well that's life” residual feeling...if that makes sense.