BOONE'S LICK by Larry McMurtry - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
See all titles by Larry McMurtry.Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry
McMurtry's return to the kind of story that made him famous — an
enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century west. Like his bestsellers Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Comanche Moon, and Dead Man's Walk, Boone's Lick transports the reader to the era about which McMurtry writes better and more shrewdly than anyone else.
Told
with McMurtry's unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling
genius, the novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by
riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in
Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that
begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive
husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely
where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him,
encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile Indians as they
go. With them are Shay's siblings, G.T., Neva, and baby Marcy; Shay's
uncle, Seth; his Granpa Crackenthorpe; and Mary Margaret's beautiful
half-sister, Rose. During their journey they pick up a barefooted
priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days,
and persuade them to join in their travels.
At the heart of the
novel, and the adventure, is Mary Margaret, whom we first meet shooting
a sheriff's horse out from underneath him in order to feed her family.
Forceful, interesting, and determined, she is written with McMurtry's
trademark deftness and sympathy for women, and is in every way a match
for the worst the west can muster.
Boone's Lick abounds
with the incidents, the excitements, and the dangers of lifeon the
plains. Its huge cast of characters includes such historical figures as
Wild Bill Hickok and the unfortunate Colonel Fetterman (whose arrogance
and ineptitude led to one of the U.S. Army's worst and bloodiest
defeats at the hands of the Cheyenne and Sioux) as well as the Cecil
family (itself based on a real family of nineteenth-century traders and
haulers).
The story of their trek in pursuit of Dick, and the
discovery of his second and third families, is told with brilliance,
humor, and overwhelming joie de vivre in a novel that is at once high
adventure, a perfect western tale, and a moving love story — it is, in
short, vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits,
his unerring sense of the west, and his unrivaled eye for the telling
detail.
Boone's Lick is one of McMurtry's richest works of fiction to date.