A straightforward story about a straightforward man. Flint Murdock, with family and friends, left Little River, Territory of Montana, to head for San Francisco. They boarded the transcontinental railway in Billings on December 18, 1887, a snowy Sunday. It was a festive group on their first leg of a meandering journey to see California and the Pacific Ocean. But a new adversary - and an old vendetta - lay ahead.
Size: 333 KB (61,483 words)
Genre: Western
Sex Contents: Some Sex
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Review by Myrtus [other reviews by Myrtus]
Reviewed:
“On the road again: Flint Murdock” is the direct follow-up to “Frontiers: Flint Murdock” and this review has been made based on the fact that people should already have knowledge of the first story “Frontiers”.
I liked the one before and I liked this one too.
Now, if I am to be less succinct, I would have to say that while different from the first one, the themes are still close enough that I didn’t feel lost reading it despite not going back to “Frontiers” to get a refreshed memory of it. Most of the urgent not resolved yet plot is now done and over in a satisfactory manner (a little bittersweet perhaps?). The ending, while open, is still not frustrating and I can only be thankful for it. What needed to be accomplished indeed was and the rest is left for a possible future to come. However, what might interest people the most is the change in tone.
I have to admit it took me some time to realize the change but it finally crept on me by the time I was 3/4 done. First, the “weight” given to the characters has changed. The women from his past (writing his family would have worked too) have a much more important role and their characters are much more developed that one could have suspected. Cayuze, Flint’s partner is also, with a lot of subtlety, developed further than I had expected. On the contrary, Rosie felt a lot more subdued, or at least she was before the very end. Her mother, Flint’s female companion? Pretty much no memory of her.
Flint was the one who pushed me to realize things had changed. Mostly because he felt like he… like he had lost much of his drive? As if he was stuck in some kind of rut. Passivity seemed to be his motto and reaction his only action. On the contrary, the other characters all had pretty much their moment of glory. As with Rosie, it took him most of the book to, little by little, begin to grow in a new direction. If being a gunman, almost an enforcer in the first book was enough, this one proved it was no longer satisfactory. Once again, it was proven that making the first step of change is often the hardest. Strangely enough, this made me feel as if this book was a transitional one, a “between-two-states-of-being” book where the characters were given the space to grow as individuals and as a family instead of bludgeoning them with unrelenting tragedy.
Despite all those changes which made me somewhat uncomfortable while I was reading it because I was more or less lost as to what direction she was trying to take, Paige Hawthorne proved once again that she possessed the talent and the depth of breath necessary to write a story in the context of a much younger America while still keeping an interesting storyline and mostly attaching characters.
In the end, I can only say that I’ve gotten grateful for the wisely chosen level of danger in the story. They are not fighting to make money. They are not fighting to save the world. They are just making their way in a changing society, one step at a time, doing their best to be good people. And that, more than anything else, allows us to be entranced by the story, to follow them on their way for a little while, never feeling sad that parting is coming but always happy that they stayed true to themselves.
No technical review since I still do not consider myself qualified for it. I had no issue reading it and nothing glaring tried to jump at me from the sentences in front of my eyes. The story is also still a nine because it didn’t lose much of its freshness despite it being a sequel and it still kept the world tight by not over expanding without reason. Appeal was between eight and nine because of the growing pains I felt in parallel to Flint and it tainted a little my perception of the story. However, fictional partial powerlessness shouldn’t be a criterion of judgement for influencing my rating so a nine it is.
