The Thunderbird

Skyrider #2

by B.M. Bower

What happens when the hardscrabble cowboys of the Wild West are introduced to the latest in twentieth-century technology? In some cases, they take to the sky as the daring pilots who are preparing the country to go to war. The Thunder Bird is the sequel to B. M. Bower's earlier novel Skyrider, and it packs in just as much aerial excitement as its predecessor.

Genres: Westerns

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan, née Muzzy, best known by her pseudonym B. M. Bower, was an American author who wrote novels, fictional short stories, and screenplays about the American Old West. Her works, featuring cowboys and cows of the Flying R Ranch in Montana, reflected "an interest in ranch life, the use of working cowboys as main characters (even in romantic plots), the occasional appearance of eastern types for the sake of contrast, a sense of western geography as simultaneously harsh and grand, and a good deal of factual attention to such matters as cattle branding and bronc busting.

Born Bertha Muzzy in Otter Tail County, MN and living her early years in Big Sandy, Montana, she was married three times: to Clayton Bower, in 1890; to Bertrand William Sinclair,(also a Western author) in 1912; and to Robert Elsworth Cowan, in 1921. Bower's 1912 novel Lonesome Land was praised in The Bookman magazine for its characterization. She wrote 57 Western novels, several of which were turned into films.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this sequel to Skyrider, Bower gives us another adventure in the lives of Johnny Jewel and Mary V Selmer, even though Mary V takes a definite back seat most of the time here while Johnny does all the high flying.

The story picks up right where the other book ends, so there has been no time for either Johnny or Mary V to grow up any. Mary V especially is as spoiled and self-centered as she was in the earlier book, and all I can say about her drive through Los Angeles in her brand new Stutz Bear Cat is that it would have been awesome in a movie of the day, but I am SO glad I was not in the car with her.

I never could see what the V in Mary V's name might have stood for, but I did find out that she was only seventeen, which explains a lot. Rich, spoiled and seventeen is not a very good combination!

Bower wrote movie scripts as well as novels, and quite a few of her books were turned into movies back in the day. She may have always had that in mind while she wrote, I'm guessing, since so many of these books of hers make me think how smoothly they would adapt to film and how much fun they would be to watch.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, Johnny is determined to pay the debt he feels he owes to Mary V's father, but on his own terms, not by working it off as a cowboy. He wants to fly and he just has to figure out a way to earn money with his plane!

Bland Halliday returns to act as mechanic and helper....but has he reformed from the tricky character he was in Skyrider? Can Johnny or anyone trust him? Will he keep his word when Johnny ends up in jail for a week? (Not a good idea to punch the sheriff, Johnny, not even when he deserves it!)

We fly from the ranch to Tucson to Los Angeles to Mexico to Tijuana (only Bower spelled it Tia Juana) to San Diego. At times I wanted to smack johnny for being such a dreamer that he didn't see what was going on with the smooth-talking man he meets in LA, but once he finally wakes up to the new mess he has gotten himself into, he made up for his youthful innocence and (dare I say) stupidity.

Another fun Bower story. I don't know if any of the remaining titles will continue Johnny's adventures, but it would be interesting to see What Happens Next with our young Skyrider, so I will cross fingers and keep my eyes open when I come back to Bower in a few weeks. Only six more books to go and then I will have to start the list over when I want a dose of Bower's type of comfort read. But that is more than okay with me!

[Elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sequel to Skyrider. Still entertaining, but I think the first book was better. In some sequels, characters tend to lose their personality or chemistry a little, but I don't think that's the case here. It's more that nobody seems to have learned their lessons as implied in the end of Skyrider—Johnny seems more stubborn and Mary V more spoiled. And if taking himself too seriously is Johnny's biggest problem, the way the story winds up doesn't seem calculated to improve that! Bland Halliday's apparent change of heart is a little difficult to swallow too. This is much less of a Western, except in the desert setting of certain parts of the book; it focuses more on the airplane itself and later takes a foray into international intrigue. The glimpse of Los Angeles, San Diego and the surrounding areas circa 1919, when the book was published, is interesting—I just saw an aerial shot of LA during coverage of a sports game, and it's incredibly different from the airplane's-eye view of over ninety years ago.

[Larry Piper · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure I'll be able to finish this. I've read four B. M. Bower books previously, and liked it all. Not this one. It's silly and tedious as all hell.

So, we have Johnny Jewell, an aspiring flyer in the early days of air travel (1919). He's engaged to Mary V. Selmer, who is the spoiled daughter of a rich rancher, Sudden Selmer. Johnny owes Sudden a bunch of money because he let a herd of horses get stolen while he was playing with his airplane. He's determined to pay back his debt before marrying Mary V. An old crony from the first book in this series (I didn't know there was a series), Bland Halliday, shows up, looking for a hand out. He is supremely sketchy, but apparently knows something about airplanes and will "help" Johnny learn to profit from his owning a plane.

Well, that all sounds like an interesting beginning. But, what we have, in the first third of the book at least, are endless pages of adolescent squabbling between Johnny and Mary V. There's not a lot of other things going on except for their adolescent squabbling. Yeech!

Probably deserves 1½*. Can't get 2 because I couldn't finish it.