April 2023 MBR The Western Fiction Shelf

The Western Fiction Shelf

Me an' Gus
James D. Crownover
Five Star Publishing
c/o Gale Cengage Learning, Inc.
20 Channel Center Street, Boston, MA 02210
https://www.gale.com/five-star
www.cengageptr.com
9781432895853, $25.95, HC, 245pp

https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Effie-Frost-K-Hollenbeck/dp/1432895850

Synopsis: When Comanches killed their fathers, young Sutter "Sut" Lowery and August "Gus" Bell became the primary supporters of their families until their mothers married again. One night, Gus's mother is beaten again by her husband. Gus kills Ben and dumps the body in a sinkhole.

That night, Sut and Gus hit out for tall cane. And thus begins the odyssey of Sut and Gus into the world of cattle drives, rustlers, Indians, horses, and manhood.

Sut discovers he has inherited his mother's gift of prescience and rescues two white children from a Comanche trap.

At the crossing of the Arkansas, Gus and Sut work to eliminate a gang of thugs from control of the ford. In Abilene they attempt to stop a kid from rolling a drunk -- and end up wanted by half the town and a bunch of vaqueros. They also battle an old Mountain Man who is killing the ranch's cattle.

Sut and Gus's exploits take them far and wide in this coming-of-age adventurous saga set in the American west.

Critique: The stuff of which popular western mini-series are made for television, "Me an' Gus" clearly showcases author James D. Crownover's storytelling skills and why he has receieved the Spur Award for his western novels. Original, entertaining, laced with historical accuracies with respect to the handling of cattle in the west, "Me an' Gus" is a terrific read from beginning to end and highly recommended for both the personal reading lists of dedicated western novel fans and community library Western Fiction collections.

Editorial Note: James D. Crownover (https://historicalnovelsociety.org/by/james-d-crownover) began writing a historical novel about four generations of a mixed Cherokee family that migrates from Tennessee to New Mexico Territory in the nineteenth century. His novels include: "Wild Ran the Rivers" (which in 2015 won two Western Writers of America Spurs for best historical novel and best first novel); "The Battle of Half Moon Mountain"; "Picketwire Vaquero" (which was recognized in 2017 by True West Magazine as Best of the Rest Frontier Fiction); "Tales of the Last Frontier"; "Triple Play" (which was finalist in the Will Rogers Medallion Awards and also the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards); "The Ox That Gored"; and "If These Walls Could Talk".

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