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Seven Ox Seven: A Story of Some Ways in the West. Part One, Escondido Bound
Seven souls risk everything to seek a home on the West Texas frontier. Will they discover a secret Eden, or have they embarked on a dangerous misadventure? Cowboys Luke Stuart and Tom Schurtz meet in the infamous Dodge City at the end of trail drives in 1877. Back in Texas, Luke and his wife, Elizabeth, divulge a plan to Tom. The Stuarts and Tom consequently partner up and venture out to establish an ideal ranch in the canyons region of the Llano Estacado, only recently (and not completely) vacated by the Comanche.They seek the mysterious Canyon Escondido, which may not exist. They have learned of it from the family lore of neighbors and the legends of their peoples, Apache and Mexican. In hope, the pioneers drive their herd across rolling plains, through notorious settlements and the wanton buffalo slaughter. Various challenges test their determination along the path they have chosen, not least so when they finally face the success or failure of their quest and what must then follow.
672 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2007
7 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
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May 29, 2025
I picked up a copy of 7OX7 when the author came and did a book signing at the bookstore I worked at. I am a huge Western fan, so I picked up this and part 1 of book 2. It sat for a few months because I wasn't ready to commit to such a big, dense book, but I decided on a whim to check it out this week finally and wow.
I don't want people to think I'm exaggerating when I say this is one of the most bafflingly written books I've ever encountered-- and one of the worst books I have ever read. The book is BAD. There is very little redeeming about it because of the way it's written, and yet it frustrates me because beneath the layers upon layers upon layers upon layers upon LAYERS of padding, useless information, and terrible writing, there's some interesting ideas.
I spent the back half of this book plotting out everything I would do to rewrite this story into something even worth consuming. It seemed so obvious how much better this book could be if put in the hands of a competent writer--though I also realize that it would require changing virtually every single thing about this book. I don't blame any of the other 1 stars for not finishing this book. I nearly DNFed it after chapter 1, but then talked myself into continuing and thus committed to finishing this book. I would see it through to its end and provide a critical review that has a full understanding of this book.
I might even read part 1 of book 2. Because I hate myself, apparently. It only took me four or so days to read this because I was caught in such a desperate frenzy to finish this and move on to books I actually want to read.
Let me start by saying that P.A. Ritzer is a perfectly nice fellow. I chatted with him on my 15 because I was excited to see a Western author. He was very nice, and he does a great job selling this book. It's a fun idea in theory-- cowboys looking for a legendary canyon to stake their claim and make their mark upon the world. The thing is, though, that's just not... entirely what the book actually is.
I mean, yeah, they definitely do that. But I assumed that the first book of this apparent trilogy would be all about finding the canyon. However, they find the canyon around 250 pages into a 650 page book. They don't struggle for it, really. Yeah, they travel around, but they just happen upon it with no real work done, and then boom, premise of the book is over. The next 400 pages is them settling in, including a 30 page sequence of them building a house, and then a 20 page sequence of them building another house, and characters leaving and everyone being sad, and then characters coming back about 20 pages later and everyone acting like this is such a big and important deal.
I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm dancing around the HUGE, and I mean truly massive issue with this novel. It's the thing that makes this book so genuinely baffling to me. No joke, no joke, 90% of this novel is summaries and random tangents. In P.A. Ritzer's attempts to create a very historically accurate Western, he tries to achieve this by going on multi-page tangents about random historical facts that the reader doesn't need to know, kills the pacing, and bogs down the book in useless details. But I could tolerate it, no matter how baffling it is, if it wasn't for all the stupid summaries.
Virtually nothing happens in this book on-screen. There are only a handful of scenes in each chapter, which are around ONE HUNDRED PAGES EACH. And worse yet, a vast majority of the scenes are completely worthless. They don't move the plot along, they don't teach us anything interesting about the characters, they aren't even entertaining. Every attempt at humor is so extremely unfunny it's almost impressive. The characters have no real bonds or personality traits. Every relationship is developed off-screen; we are merely told about the bonds forming, and have to take Ritzer's word for it.
God forbid the characters meaningfully interact, talk to each other about important things. No, we have to have another scene of these people eating breakfast. Or eating lunch. Or praying.
Oh yes, the Christian stuff. Did I forget to mention that this is basically guerilla Christian fiction? I wouldn't be so irritated if the author was more up front about just how religious this book was going to be. It's honestly more Christian (okay, well, Catholic to be more specific) than actual Christian fiction I've read before. It's also preachier-- to an insulting degree that clearly shows to me that the author sees himself as superior for being a Catholic, even heavily implying that people can only really be good and happy if they're Christian, or that Catholics are superiorto Protestant Christians.
The Christian values and the misogyny that stems from it in chapter 1 creeped me out so much I almost stopped reading because of it. The way women are handled in this book is pretty terrible. Not the worst in the world, but it reeks of misogyny and of expecting women only to be homemakers. The women have no world outside of caring for kids and formanchildren their husbands and male friends/family members. It's just so fulfilling for them, though!
So that's why the one real female character in the book, Elizabeth, ONLY ever cooks and watches the kids. Otherwise, all she does is cry and be scared and be just so emotional. Her husband doesn't even respect her enough to keep her in the loop about the issues going on with the antagonist, with the excuse that he's "protecting" her as if she's so stupid she can't notice bad stuff is going down. And she DOES notice, and yet her husband refuses to tell her anything, like that helps when she's in charge of protecting the kids.
Nothing wrong with a homemaker woman. But it seems clear to me that this what the author believes all women should do. He looks down on the women who are down on their luck in this book, working in dancehalls, making money off of cowboys who want some feminine companionship after getting into town like they're the most evil things on Earth. There's a female character the main cowboy befriends that is such a good woman that she leaves the evil practice even though all she does is dance and talk to the cowboys? The whiffs of anti-sex work is lame as hell and, to me, antithetical to actual Christian values.
It's also just so weird to treat women spending time with men to make money as this extremely evil thing, like it's their fault and has nothing to do with the men?
There's also a lot of settler-colonialist apologia. He acknowledges the way Natives were treated was messed up, but shrugs and says people are also entitled to this land now stolen because... God? I don't know. It was stupid and it was racist.
Whatever. Let's move on.
The characters are all incredibly boring. Since most of the book happens off-screen and we just have stuff that happened described to us instead of showing us the scenes, none of the characters really have, like... personality traits? Beyond "good Christian," of course. We start to see some flashes of something else when the main conflict kicks in and the main cowboys start becoming angry and struggling with whether to respond with violence or to simply let it all go. THAT was something. When the book actually lets scenes happen, when the story actually plays out before the readers' eyes, which happens about, oh... about 3 times total in the entire novel, it's actually kind of interesting-- dare I say, even a touch engaging!
So you may wonder how this conflict is handled if most stuff is merely summarized instead of shown. Well, not to worry. Because there's actually no conflict in the book at all from page 50 to page 500. I'm not joking. I am not joking. I cannot express to you enough how much that is not an exaggeration or a joke in the slightest. There is NO CONFLICT IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF THIS NOVEL. There's some small conflicts in the first 50 pages, which is what got me interested. But there's no real conflict once the cowboys and their family starts heading out to find this stupid canyon. They don't really struggle there. Once they get there, they don't struggle. But we do get hundreds of pages of them building houses and doing random menial tasks, and a little side bar where one cowboy returns to the city to dump a woman the author sets up an underdeveloped romance with, rendering the entire point of the relationship moot because although the cowboy was just SO interested in her, the second he could have her he grows bored and decides she isn't good enough for him and he doesn't actually want her, and then is the good guy even though he refuses to talk to her about it at all. Just dumps her and barely speaks to her while she cries and shrugs like "well, nothing I can do!"
I think it's fine they didn't end up together. I think that's an interesting approach, it's just that it feels totally worthless when the romance is set up with all this off-screen summarizing, and then it fizzles out into nothing. It's so stupid, dude.
I'm digressing. The author's writing style is rubbing off on me. Let's get back to the sheer lack of conflict.
The antagonist, who appears once in chapter 1 and then vanishes until page 500, actually is kind of interesting. I didn't expect any of the minor conflicts in chapter 1 to come back or mean anything. He's a cattle rancher that hates homesteaders, so he starts messing with the cowboys and their family in the canyon because he wants the legendary canyon for himself. It's kind of interesting whenever there's actual scenes. I LIKE this element. It's the only thing about the book I like, period.
The issue is, like... why does this happen in book 1? The first book should've only been them finding the canyon, then this conflict with the cattleman can be set up in book 2 and worked through then, showing that just because they found their new home doesn't mean it's all good, and then book 3 can be what I assume the actual book 2 will be, them dealing with the consequences of how the cattleman has treated them. I don't understand why you would introduce the conflict of the plot 500 pages into the book. I don't understand it.
The author seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a book is and what a book does. This novel is a 650 page summary of a book that hasn't been written yet. This novel is the ramblings of a Catholic who wants to preach at you about Christ and his political beliefs, often taking multiple page tangents to do so. There is a 20 page tangents where the characters or story are not mentioned once. 10 pages of it is a summary of the Comanche people and their history, and the back half is Ritzer complaining about hippies and saying that the only way to get back to true nature and goodness in man is to become a Christian. Sometimes, he'll mention the characters as "thinking" about these ramblings, trying to dress up his intrusive ramblings as being the musings of the characters, but don't get it mistaken, it's him. It's the author lecturing you.
What in the hell do hippies have to do with a Western taking place in 1877? What does anything he talks about have to do with the Western? What does it have to do with the characters? Either write a history book or write a Western. You clearly can't do both. Ritzer can write decently. But it's clear no one told him no, no one gave him feedback or told him that this is not how novels works. You can't have the entire novel be a summary. You have to let the characters interact, you have to have the relationships develop naturally, you have to give them flaws, you have to give them personalities, you have to have an actual plot. You have to have an actual conflict. You have to have SOMETHING happen in this book. What a waste of 650 pages. If you cut all the bull out of this book and only kept the parts of the book actually ABOUT the plot and characters, the book would probably be no more than 200 pages, and I'm being generous. It'd still be bad, but it'd be infinitely better.
This is the kind of book you have to read to really understand the extent of what I've said here, but I would not recommend anyone read it. Don't bother with it like I did.
I don't want people to think I'm exaggerating when I say this is one of the most bafflingly written books I've ever encountered-- and one of the worst books I have ever read. The book is BAD. There is very little redeeming about it because of the way it's written, and yet it frustrates me because beneath the layers upon layers upon layers upon layers upon LAYERS of padding, useless information, and terrible writing, there's some interesting ideas.
I spent the back half of this book plotting out everything I would do to rewrite this story into something even worth consuming. It seemed so obvious how much better this book could be if put in the hands of a competent writer--though I also realize that it would require changing virtually every single thing about this book. I don't blame any of the other 1 stars for not finishing this book. I nearly DNFed it after chapter 1, but then talked myself into continuing and thus committed to finishing this book. I would see it through to its end and provide a critical review that has a full understanding of this book.
I might even read part 1 of book 2. Because I hate myself, apparently. It only took me four or so days to read this because I was caught in such a desperate frenzy to finish this and move on to books I actually want to read.
Let me start by saying that P.A. Ritzer is a perfectly nice fellow. I chatted with him on my 15 because I was excited to see a Western author. He was very nice, and he does a great job selling this book. It's a fun idea in theory-- cowboys looking for a legendary canyon to stake their claim and make their mark upon the world. The thing is, though, that's just not... entirely what the book actually is.
I mean, yeah, they definitely do that. But I assumed that the first book of this apparent trilogy would be all about finding the canyon. However, they find the canyon around 250 pages into a 650 page book. They don't struggle for it, really. Yeah, they travel around, but they just happen upon it with no real work done, and then boom, premise of the book is over. The next 400 pages is them settling in, including a 30 page sequence of them building a house, and then a 20 page sequence of them building another house, and characters leaving and everyone being sad, and then characters coming back about 20 pages later and everyone acting like this is such a big and important deal.
I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm dancing around the HUGE, and I mean truly massive issue with this novel. It's the thing that makes this book so genuinely baffling to me. No joke, no joke, 90% of this novel is summaries and random tangents. In P.A. Ritzer's attempts to create a very historically accurate Western, he tries to achieve this by going on multi-page tangents about random historical facts that the reader doesn't need to know, kills the pacing, and bogs down the book in useless details. But I could tolerate it, no matter how baffling it is, if it wasn't for all the stupid summaries.
Virtually nothing happens in this book on-screen. There are only a handful of scenes in each chapter, which are around ONE HUNDRED PAGES EACH. And worse yet, a vast majority of the scenes are completely worthless. They don't move the plot along, they don't teach us anything interesting about the characters, they aren't even entertaining. Every attempt at humor is so extremely unfunny it's almost impressive. The characters have no real bonds or personality traits. Every relationship is developed off-screen; we are merely told about the bonds forming, and have to take Ritzer's word for it.
God forbid the characters meaningfully interact, talk to each other about important things. No, we have to have another scene of these people eating breakfast. Or eating lunch. Or praying.
Oh yes, the Christian stuff. Did I forget to mention that this is basically guerilla Christian fiction? I wouldn't be so irritated if the author was more up front about just how religious this book was going to be. It's honestly more Christian (okay, well, Catholic to be more specific) than actual Christian fiction I've read before. It's also preachier-- to an insulting degree that clearly shows to me that the author sees himself as superior for being a Catholic, even heavily implying that people can only really be good and happy if they're Christian, or that Catholics are superiorto Protestant Christians.
The Christian values and the misogyny that stems from it in chapter 1 creeped me out so much I almost stopped reading because of it. The way women are handled in this book is pretty terrible. Not the worst in the world, but it reeks of misogyny and of expecting women only to be homemakers. The women have no world outside of caring for kids and for
So that's why the one real female character in the book, Elizabeth, ONLY ever cooks and watches the kids. Otherwise, all she does is cry and be scared and be just so emotional. Her husband doesn't even respect her enough to keep her in the loop about the issues going on with the antagonist, with the excuse that he's "protecting" her as if she's so stupid she can't notice bad stuff is going down. And she DOES notice, and yet her husband refuses to tell her anything, like that helps when she's in charge of protecting the kids.
Nothing wrong with a homemaker woman. But it seems clear to me that this what the author believes all women should do. He looks down on the women who are down on their luck in this book, working in dancehalls, making money off of cowboys who want some feminine companionship after getting into town like they're the most evil things on Earth. There's a female character the main cowboy befriends that is such a good woman that she leaves the evil practice even though all she does is dance and talk to the cowboys? The whiffs of anti-sex work is lame as hell and, to me, antithetical to actual Christian values.
It's also just so weird to treat women spending time with men to make money as this extremely evil thing, like it's their fault and has nothing to do with the men?
There's also a lot of settler-colonialist apologia. He acknowledges the way Natives were treated was messed up, but shrugs and says people are also entitled to this land now stolen because... God? I don't know. It was stupid and it was racist.
Whatever. Let's move on.
The characters are all incredibly boring. Since most of the book happens off-screen and we just have stuff that happened described to us instead of showing us the scenes, none of the characters really have, like... personality traits? Beyond "good Christian," of course. We start to see some flashes of something else when the main conflict kicks in and the main cowboys start becoming angry and struggling with whether to respond with violence or to simply let it all go. THAT was something. When the book actually lets scenes happen, when the story actually plays out before the readers' eyes, which happens about, oh... about 3 times total in the entire novel, it's actually kind of interesting-- dare I say, even a touch engaging!
So you may wonder how this conflict is handled if most stuff is merely summarized instead of shown. Well, not to worry. Because there's actually no conflict in the book at all from page 50 to page 500. I'm not joking. I am not joking. I cannot express to you enough how much that is not an exaggeration or a joke in the slightest. There is NO CONFLICT IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF THIS NOVEL. There's some small conflicts in the first 50 pages, which is what got me interested. But there's no real conflict once the cowboys and their family starts heading out to find this stupid canyon. They don't really struggle there. Once they get there, they don't struggle. But we do get hundreds of pages of them building houses and doing random menial tasks, and a little side bar where one cowboy returns to the city to dump a woman the author sets up an underdeveloped romance with, rendering the entire point of the relationship moot because although the cowboy was just SO interested in her, the second he could have her he grows bored and decides she isn't good enough for him and he doesn't actually want her, and then is the good guy even though he refuses to talk to her about it at all. Just dumps her and barely speaks to her while she cries and shrugs like "well, nothing I can do!"
I think it's fine they didn't end up together. I think that's an interesting approach, it's just that it feels totally worthless when the romance is set up with all this off-screen summarizing, and then it fizzles out into nothing. It's so stupid, dude.
I'm digressing. The author's writing style is rubbing off on me. Let's get back to the sheer lack of conflict.
The antagonist, who appears once in chapter 1 and then vanishes until page 500, actually is kind of interesting. I didn't expect any of the minor conflicts in chapter 1 to come back or mean anything. He's a cattle rancher that hates homesteaders, so he starts messing with the cowboys and their family in the canyon because he wants the legendary canyon for himself. It's kind of interesting whenever there's actual scenes. I LIKE this element. It's the only thing about the book I like, period.
The issue is, like... why does this happen in book 1? The first book should've only been them finding the canyon, then this conflict with the cattleman can be set up in book 2 and worked through then, showing that just because they found their new home doesn't mean it's all good, and then book 3 can be what I assume the actual book 2 will be, them dealing with the consequences of how the cattleman has treated them. I don't understand why you would introduce the conflict of the plot 500 pages into the book. I don't understand it.
The author seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a book is and what a book does. This novel is a 650 page summary of a book that hasn't been written yet. This novel is the ramblings of a Catholic who wants to preach at you about Christ and his political beliefs, often taking multiple page tangents to do so. There is a 20 page tangents where the characters or story are not mentioned once. 10 pages of it is a summary of the Comanche people and their history, and the back half is Ritzer complaining about hippies and saying that the only way to get back to true nature and goodness in man is to become a Christian. Sometimes, he'll mention the characters as "thinking" about these ramblings, trying to dress up his intrusive ramblings as being the musings of the characters, but don't get it mistaken, it's him. It's the author lecturing you.
What in the hell do hippies have to do with a Western taking place in 1877? What does anything he talks about have to do with the Western? What does it have to do with the characters? Either write a history book or write a Western. You clearly can't do both. Ritzer can write decently. But it's clear no one told him no, no one gave him feedback or told him that this is not how novels works. You can't have the entire novel be a summary. You have to let the characters interact, you have to have the relationships develop naturally, you have to give them flaws, you have to give them personalities, you have to have an actual plot. You have to have an actual conflict. You have to have SOMETHING happen in this book. What a waste of 650 pages. If you cut all the bull out of this book and only kept the parts of the book actually ABOUT the plot and characters, the book would probably be no more than 200 pages, and I'm being generous. It'd still be bad, but it'd be infinitely better.
This is the kind of book you have to read to really understand the extent of what I've said here, but I would not recommend anyone read it. Don't bother with it like I did.
May 31, 2012
I selected this book on Amazon because it was labeled as a "western". Since one of my favorite books is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, I thought I'd give this one a try. Oops. On the positive side, it appeared to be very well researched and had a large bibliography. On the downside, it was not was I was looking for. I love character-driven novels and if they take place in an interesting setting, so much the better.
I had to force myself to read multiple chapters of this book. In the first 60 pages or so here is the sum total of the action: Tom arrives in dusty Dodge City. He gets a drink and stops a fight. He eats a meal. He rents a room. He takes a bath, buys new clothes, takes a nap. He wakes up and eats another meal.
The reason this action took so many pages to unfurl is because it was interspersed with heavy Christian philosophy. Pages and pages of, "the Creator" this and that. And when Tom (or the author) wasn't musing about the bible, he was reviewing the most boring iteration of Civil War politics, open range versus homesteaders, and I have no idea what else. I finally took to flipping to the beginnings of all of the subsequent chapters, desperately searching for ACTION (this is a "western" after all) and I gave up.
I had to force myself to read multiple chapters of this book. In the first 60 pages or so here is the sum total of the action: Tom arrives in dusty Dodge City. He gets a drink and stops a fight. He eats a meal. He rents a room. He takes a bath, buys new clothes, takes a nap. He wakes up and eats another meal.
The reason this action took so many pages to unfurl is because it was interspersed with heavy Christian philosophy. Pages and pages of, "the Creator" this and that. And when Tom (or the author) wasn't musing about the bible, he was reviewing the most boring iteration of Civil War politics, open range versus homesteaders, and I have no idea what else. I finally took to flipping to the beginnings of all of the subsequent chapters, desperately searching for ACTION (this is a "western" after all) and I gave up.
September 1, 2013
What a waste of money and time. I don't buy and read westerns to be preached to, given a biblical history of the world and then be subjected to the author's views, not-so-cleverly disguised as the character's half-asleep musings and memories. I actually read about 60 pages, searching for a plot, but never found it.
Luckily, I only spent about 3 bucks on the book, as it was in the "Get rid of these books" bin.
It's the time I spent reading it that I regret the most, I will never get that time back.
Give me Louis L'Amour any day.
Luckily, I only spent about 3 bucks on the book, as it was in the "Get rid of these books" bin.
It's the time I spent reading it that I regret the most, I will never get that time back.
Give me Louis L'Amour any day.
June 2, 2014
Captivating. Riveting. Historical.
I stumbled upon this book in what some might call a serendipitous manner. One of my tweets was “favorited” and then “retweeted” by a well known TV commentator. In turn, one of her followers also favorited it and then decided to follow me. I reviewed the follower’s bio and learned he was an author that wrote historical fiction. I found his ebook on BN.com and purchased it the same day.
Mr. Ritzer was able to take the reader and place them alongside the characters as if you were a silent, invisible observer of the unfolding events. In doing so, the reader joins up with Tom Schurtz and Luke Stuart and his young family as they make their way to the Panhandle of Texas to start a ranch in the 1870s. The reader experiences the tired, sore muscles and dry mouth of long hours in a saddle breathing dust from a cattle drive and the feeling of excitement and pride of starting a ranch. Throughout the novel, he uses historical figures and important dates and events to add flavor to the story.
His character introduction and development is superb. You are invested in their lives and activities. You rejoice when their rewards are bountiful and saddened when tragedy befalls them. The actions of the protagonists are led by their faith and spiritual convictions in all they do, even to the point I was hoping they might throw them aside and just take care of business. However, at the end, I was glad they did not. The author takes you inside the mind of Tom Schurtz as he ponders the meaning of scriptures, how he should use them to guide his life, his internal struggle to follow God and lean not on his own wisdom.
Mr. Ritzer must have spent countless hours researching the events portrayed in the novel. As a lover of historical fiction I enjoy and appreciate this. However, I understand how some might believe this might serve to slow the pace and be tempted to skip over those pages. It is also obvious Mr. Ritzer has a strong faith and knowledge of scripture and uses it within the text of the novel. This too, might make the casual reader want to skip over these words, but I urge you not to. It is within these facts and scripture that we fully understand the internal battle that we all must fight. How we respond to problems in our lives. How we react to moral dilemmas.
I recommend this book to readers that enjoy Larry McMurtry and some of Louis L’Amour books, even some readers that just enjoy a good western. On a final note, I believe this book would be an excellent “additional reading” selection for high school American History classes, or perhaps as book report.
I cannot wait for Volume 2.
I stumbled upon this book in what some might call a serendipitous manner. One of my tweets was “favorited” and then “retweeted” by a well known TV commentator. In turn, one of her followers also favorited it and then decided to follow me. I reviewed the follower’s bio and learned he was an author that wrote historical fiction. I found his ebook on BN.com and purchased it the same day.
Mr. Ritzer was able to take the reader and place them alongside the characters as if you were a silent, invisible observer of the unfolding events. In doing so, the reader joins up with Tom Schurtz and Luke Stuart and his young family as they make their way to the Panhandle of Texas to start a ranch in the 1870s. The reader experiences the tired, sore muscles and dry mouth of long hours in a saddle breathing dust from a cattle drive and the feeling of excitement and pride of starting a ranch. Throughout the novel, he uses historical figures and important dates and events to add flavor to the story.
His character introduction and development is superb. You are invested in their lives and activities. You rejoice when their rewards are bountiful and saddened when tragedy befalls them. The actions of the protagonists are led by their faith and spiritual convictions in all they do, even to the point I was hoping they might throw them aside and just take care of business. However, at the end, I was glad they did not. The author takes you inside the mind of Tom Schurtz as he ponders the meaning of scriptures, how he should use them to guide his life, his internal struggle to follow God and lean not on his own wisdom.
Mr. Ritzer must have spent countless hours researching the events portrayed in the novel. As a lover of historical fiction I enjoy and appreciate this. However, I understand how some might believe this might serve to slow the pace and be tempted to skip over those pages. It is also obvious Mr. Ritzer has a strong faith and knowledge of scripture and uses it within the text of the novel. This too, might make the casual reader want to skip over these words, but I urge you not to. It is within these facts and scripture that we fully understand the internal battle that we all must fight. How we respond to problems in our lives. How we react to moral dilemmas.
I recommend this book to readers that enjoy Larry McMurtry and some of Louis L’Amour books, even some readers that just enjoy a good western. On a final note, I believe this book would be an excellent “additional reading” selection for high school American History classes, or perhaps as book report.
I cannot wait for Volume 2.
April 26, 2013
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the west was settled. I'd give it a five star rating if it was 100 pages shorter. Understand, I'd never give a James Michener book more than four starts due to the length. So, don't let the 4 star rating diminish my opinion of the quality of the writing.
Ritzer is able to put the reader into to the minds to multiple characters better than any author I've read. Generally, head hopping has me trying to remember who thoughts it is I'm reading, not so with Ritzer's writing in this book.
The story moves slowly at first and gradually builds to the point that you'll want to keep reading late into the night, but also be afraid of turning the page for fear of what's going to happen to your favorite character.
Having read the book, I'm planning a visit to West Texas.
I loved it!
Ritzer is able to put the reader into to the minds to multiple characters better than any author I've read. Generally, head hopping has me trying to remember who thoughts it is I'm reading, not so with Ritzer's writing in this book.
The story moves slowly at first and gradually builds to the point that you'll want to keep reading late into the night, but also be afraid of turning the page for fear of what's going to happen to your favorite character.
Having read the book, I'm planning a visit to West Texas.
I loved it!
February 9, 2015
I really enjoyed the book. I was a great “look” into the west of the 1800’s and of family daily life. I felt that the life portrayal was realistic as well as the characters and their response to the challenges. However, there were often times where I felt the author just strayed from the story line and gave too much detail of a time period of history, specifics of the area, etc. Though this is one is a series of three, I do not feel compelled to read the sequels.
February 17, 2016
Interesting as historic fiction of settling of the west with the change to homesteading/ranching from cowboys with open grazing. The author clearly did a great deal of research and wants to be sure the reader is aware of it. However, the story gets lost in the details frequently. There are also times that the biblical religious background takes over the story. I'd love to know what happens to the characters but can't bring myself to slog through the next 2 of the trilogy.
October 7, 2014
I love good historic fiction from any era but this isn't it! The history and commentary were so clumsily in your face that I couldn't keep the story straight! I got maybe a quarter of the way through before I just had to throw in the towel!
December 10, 2012
Stopped reading about one tenth through because I felt I was being preached to by a Christian. Pages and pages were dedicated to explaining sin and God's creation of land.
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