Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former slave, but he has no desire to submit to a life of drudgery and toil on the untamed prairie. So he joins up with a motley crew headed for Texas only to be sucked into an ever-westward wandering replete with a mindless violence he can neither abet nor avoid–a terrifying trek he penitently fears may never allow for a safe return. David Anthony Durham is a genuine talent bent on devastating originality and Gabriel’s Story is as formidable a debut as we have witnessed.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Westerns, African American, Historical, Literary Fiction, Novels

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 2001

About the author

David Anthony Durham was born in New York City to parents of Caribbean descent. He grew up mostly in Maryland, but has spent the last fifteen years on the move, jumping from East to West Coast to the Rocky Mountains, and back and forth to Scotland and France several times. He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Or... actually, no he doesn't. He's back in New England at the moment.

He is the author of a trilogy of fantasy novels set in Acacia: The Sacred Band, The Other Lands, and The War With The Mein, as well as the historical novels The Risen, Pride of Carthage, Walk Through Darkness, and Gabriel’s Story. He’s won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a Legacy Award, was a Finalist for the Prix Imaginales and has twice had his books named NY Times Notable Book of the year. His novels have been published in the UK and in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Three of his novels have been optioned for development as feature films.

David received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Maryland. He has taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts, The Colorado College, for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Cal State University, and at Hampshire College. He's currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program. He reviews for The Washington Post and The Raleigh News & Observer, and has served as a judge for the Pen/Faulkner Awards.

He also writes in George RR Martin's weird and wonderful Wild Cards universe. He feels like the process makes him exercise a whole new set of creative muscles, and he loves the feeling.

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a random library selection. The cover had a kind of bleakness that appealed to me, and so I decided to go ahead and check it out. I didn't know what it was about, but I'm willing to take a chance - you never know when a random book might end up wowing you.

Unfortunately, this one wasn't one of those for me. The first bit was great. The language and the descriptions and the way that Gabriel was described as having an anger that manifested itself in silence... it was beautiful and I thought, "I'm going to love this book." But then it just kind of went downhill from there, and I gradually grew more and more bored with the book. I decided to give it until page 150 for the story to start, but ended up giving it until 175, and then skipping ahead to the end to read a bit and see if it intrigued me enough to go back and see how it got there. It didn't. So, at more than halfway through the book, I'm calling it quits.

So, what happened? Gabriel, unfortunately.He's 15 years old, which, in the beginning, made sense and seemed right. His father has just died, and his mother is dragging him and his 13 year old brother from Baltimore to Kansas because she's remarried. Gabriel resents this life-change, and resents his mother for thrusting him into this life of struggle and hard work and pointlessness. He was supposed to move UP in the world. That was his father's plan for him. To be educated and get a good job and be successful, yet here his mother's remarried a dirt-poor farmer who lives in what's essentially a mud hut in the middle of nothing.

This part I loved. I loved seeing Gabriel and this dynamic and feeling his frustration (and loving the way it was described in his silence). But Gabriel isn't an easy character to like. He's sullen and selfish with his mother, hard-headed and belligerent with his step-father, and just... a pissed off teenager in a situation that he thought was beneath him. I get that, and appreciated it.

But then Gabriel leaves. Just walks away from his family and new life, in search of something better... and that's when it started going downhill for me. I realized that I don't much like Gabriel on his own, or with other people. His anger/silence isn't as much a communication or tangible feeling, then, it was more just... lack of any personality at all. It was only in combination with his family, those people who knew him and could communicate non-verbally, that it felt real.

Outside of his family, he just seemed... bland and boring. His silence was just nothingness. He just went along and did what people said to do, just being maneuvered around as everyone around him saw fit. His last display of any kind of personality was his decision to leave his family. From then until I stopped reading, he was like a cardboard cutout that everyone dragged behind them and propped up when and where they wanted him.

I cared more about his family than him, and for a title character in a book which is specifically about his story, I just found him supremely uninteresting after he left them.

So... I ended up giving this more of my time than I think it deserved. It's not a bad book though, and a more patient and forgiving reader might be more likely to enjoy it.

[Mary Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book having just taken a writing class from the author, not really knowing what it was about. I was thrilled to discover that it is a historical Western with actual diversity in the characters that really reflects the West at the time - I love Western movies but the lack of diversity in them is a HUGE pet peeve of mine so this book had my attention right away for telling a coming of age story in the West through the lens of a young black man. I couldn't put this book down. I love the descriptions of the landscapes, the characters, the glimpses we got into the lives of the antagonists and other characters in the non-POV sections, and I appreciated the physical and emotional journey that Gabriel took. The story is harsh and brutal but it's such an engrossing read.

[Nicholas Gourlay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is a brutally wonderful piece of literature about post-civil war wild west, the hostility and confusion of mankind, the lack of faith and the abundance of promise is all very relevant. This is a very engrossing read and I couldn't help my fingers from itching to turn the next page.

Gabriel’s Story is very powerful, wonderfully deep and constantly moving.

[Aliyah Asel · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book is not a book I would read for pleasure, I did enjoy it as a book for school. Durham's style is reflected throughout the book in his descriptions of setting and the personification of his characters. He is very detail oriented and descriptive. Gabriel is a three dimensional character who expertly exemplifies the battle between moral pressures and societal expectations. When he is uprooted from his family's home in Baltimore and thrust into a new life in whitewashed Kansas, he becomes a victim of prednisone and discrimination. He decides to leave in pursuit of a different lifestyle, so he joins a gang of cowboys who are en route to Texas. The leader of the gang, Marshall, is a criminal, and his silent friend Caleb is intimidating and foreboding in his demeanor. Gabriel had to choose between whether to go back home to his family, whose story is also told through POV descriptions, or stay in the gang to protect himself and those close to him. Overall, I would recommend this book to those who are fans of historical fiction and people looking for more than a light story.

[Barb Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

story switches views between characters/places in time that lends an aura of mystery to the telling of the story. Excellent character development! Although there is violence in the story, it IS part of Gabriel's story, not just for a "shock factor" etc.

A very gripping story - hard to put the book down

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brutal western with some beautiful language and description.

[Karen Hertel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books.

[Wendopolis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story of the West told through the eyes of Gabriel, a black boy who becomes disenchanted with his family’s hard scrabble homestead life and falls in
With a group of dangerous men.

[ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Read for a Child/YA Lit class]

When Gabriel’s family moves from Baltimore to Kansas, he is not happy with the new life of farming ahead of him. He then joins a group of cowboys in an effort to escape his new life, but is then dragged into a perilous journey of violence, murder and more. Dark themes and offensive language warning.

Beautiful prose, emotionally turbulent and stacked with a lot of life’s big questions, this story is not one you will come away from unaffected.

However, there is a lot of explicit sexual violence and violence in general that is hard to read.

It’s an interesting, dark and beautiful story, but I wouldn’t recommend it for young readers.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite a rather slow start and Gabriel being a pretty unlikable character in the beginning, this ended up being a coming-of-age Western novel that I really liked.

It begins with Gabriel, his brother Ben, and their mother traveling to the Kansas plains to meet up with the boys' new step-father. Gabriel resents his mother remarrying and the move west. When his father was alive, Gabriel believed he was on track to become a rare thing, a black doctor. Now he's facing a life of busting sod to grow crops. Things get even worse when he learns that his mom had a thing for Solomon before marrying Gabe's father. When slick-talking Marshall rides into town to sell (stolen) horses, Gabe and his friend sign on for what they think are jobs as ranch hands.

Marshall turns out to be an evil SOB with no land and no possessions other than what he's carrying with him. When he learns that the old enemy who owned the horses he stole called in the law, he takes his followers on a rampage of murder, rape, and kidnapping that forces Gabe to re-evaluate his own values.

One of the things I liked most about this novel was Durham's use of race. Gabriel and his family are black, and it figures into all their interactions with neighbors, companions, and strangers. But Durham doesn't make his story about race. Gabe's race is simply one more layer of problems he has to learn to deal with as he becomes a young man. The word "nigger" is used enough to remind the reader of its ugliness, but not so much as to be off-putting. What bother me more was the use of the terms "Native American" and Mexican-American" describe those people. For the time, I just don't buy that Gabe or just about anyone else would have used those modern politically correct descriptors.

Gabriel's Story is a familiar one, but Durham adds enough unique flavoring to make it an interesting, entertaining, and often riveting story. If you like Westerns, coming-of-age stories, or non-preachy books that feature racism as a theme, you'll like it.

[Salamah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed this novel by David Anthony Durham. I have read other books by him which I LOVED so I should not be surprised by finding that I liked the book. It is a western tale and I usually would not touch a western but I chose this book for my book club book so I had to read it. The story is about a teenage boy named Gabriel living at the time after the Civil War. His mother was a former slave and married his father who lived in the North. The father did well for himself and his family and wanted Gabriel to be a doctor but the father dies. Gabriel is forced to move with his mother's new husband in a land that makes hard work a normal way of life. Gabriel decides that he does not want to live this type of life and leaves his family behind. What happens next is a series of events that make Gabriel question good and evil and just life itself. There are some pretty graphic scenes and Durham acknowledges the racism that would have been normal during this time period. I also how I learned a little bit of what the west must have been like for Blacks during this time. Usually westerns do not have any Black characters making it seem like it was a white man's world. But Durham even interweaves the lives of Mexicans and Native Americans into this story. There was so much happening at this time in the west that it seems kinds dumb when authors and movie producers limit the scope of who was living during this time and what their lives were like. This book reminds me of why Spike Lee became upset when Clint Eastwood made the movie Letters of Iwo Jima and did not give two seconds to show that black US troops were there too. It gives a distorted view that only whites had a role in that part of the war. I think the western genre has done the same thing. I feel like I know better now and that my eyes are open to understanding US history more. Wonderful read!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh what a journey! The widowed mother of Gabriel Lynch remarries and the family is moved from the sweet setting of a brownstone to the harsh lands of Kansas. Gabriel hates his new home, which is practically leaning and falling down at its seams, and the land he is forced to help till. He equally dislikes the man his mother marries, who unlike Gabriel's father, was a former slave. Gabriel goes off, into the wild wild west of a blue yonder with some rather rambunctious outlaws in search of something better than life on a little prairie. It is a coming of age story beautifully told within the realms of greed, violence, and all other kinds of maladies that made the wild west, or that general direction, infamous. This journey exposes Gabriel to an ugly world, one that trumps the hard work required on a farm, but in the midst of it, he learns the true value and strength of family.

The novel is not a fast read, nor a slow one but just right – so savor it! A friend loaned me this book and I am eternally grateful to him for it turned out to be a true gem. I love it. I enjoyed it and I look forward to reading more from this author soon.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

During post civil war, African American Gabriel, his brother and mother moved west (Kansas) to his mother's new husband, Solomon. Instead of a town and civilizaton, they found themselves on a homestead, living in a sod house. Gabriel resented Solomon and the hard work he did plowing the hard prairie sod with a mule. At first chance, Gabriel and his friend, James, joined in with a group of cowboys who had brought a herd into the town for sale. Instead of just herding cattle, the boys found that the leader of group was a thief, a murderer, and definitely not their friend. The boys experience and witness things that no twelve-year-olds should see. One of them would not ever see home again. I felt the book moved quickly and was fairly accurate with it's Kansas and western desciptons. I would love to see it made into a movie. That being said however, in good conscience I cannot put this in my school libraries. Being a conservative community, there are way too many "f" words, description of rape, and sexual acts,conversations, and innuendos.

[Laughinglioness · Rating 5 out of 5]

1870 - American West - young boys and their journey... Except this isn't your usual Western tale with romanticized cowboys and rowdy times in the saloons. The story is unrelenting in its depictions of senseless violence, racism, sexism, the trials of homesteading and the dangers faced by two young Af-Am boys traveling with strangers, far from home. The sense that their lives are not in their control comes across so poignantly that the story is hard to listen to at times. And yet, there are elements of poetry infused into every raw aspect of the tale and Durham manages to take you right up to (and sometimes onto) that line of going-to-far, without actually losing you on the other side of it. His writing style is open and honest and guides you like a gentle but firm hand through the landscape of Gabriel Lynch and his trials.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gabriel's Story, Durham's debut novel, was an enjoyable read but an over reliance on elaborate metaphor sometimes drew me out of the story. I'm sure part of this is usual first book problems where an author is looking to proove how incentive and lyrical they are, but while Durham's prose can be succinct and beautiful it can also, if only for a moment, be a bit purple. The story itself bears a surface level resemblance to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with both stories recalling a string of violent acts across the West but Durham focuses on delivering a tighter, more narratively focused story than McCarthy. I've yet to find an author that describes the beauty and tragedy of the American West quite like A.B Guthrie's The Big Sky, but Gabriel's Story is a solid book that is worth a read.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s shortly after the Civil War and fifteen-year-old Gabriel Lynch is not ready to settle down with his mother and new stepfather on a hardscrabble farm in Kansas. Instead he joins up with a group of cowboys headed for Texas. It is then trial by fire for Gabriel as he grows up on the road, witnessing the horrors and violence of the old west. This debut novel from Durham is a coming-of-age tale with elements of Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove except with an African-American cast of characters. I read this book fifteen years ago, and scenes are still burned into my memory. Take a wild ride with Gabriel Lynch.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tried to read this book about a year ago and really could not get the pages turning, but I recently picked it up again. That is how I am, if I don't jive with a book the first time and always make my way back and try again. Most the time I am pleasantly surprised and what I find and amazed that I could get into the book the first time. This book was no exception.

Loved the writing style The characters really surprised me and they did not become the people I pictured them being in my mind. I guess that makes the story accurate, since in life often those we know do not turn into or out to be the people we expected to find.

Great story.

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't find this book 'fascinating' as so many other reviewers did. It felt fake and foolish to me, and not at all historically accurate; but perhaps it is and I just don't know my American/cowboy history well enough. The language seemed contrived at worst and forced at best. There was very little conversation/dialogue, but was mostly told by a 3rd-person narrator. It was often difficult to distinguish which character the author was talking about, and the regular face type vs. the italic face type only confused this matter more.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't like this book at first. It went from dreary and depressing to coarse and brutal, but I just couldn't stop reading and leave the characters in a dismal situation. I'm glad I persevered. The characters and plot developed in ways I didn't anticipate, with an ending that provided resolution. It's a very deep and vivid story both in terms of the characters involved and the western settings.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

15 yr old Gabriel moves out west from Baltimore to start a new life in a sod house with a new stepfather, uncle and his younger brother. They are black and Gabriel thinks farming is beneath him. He and a friend take a chance to get away and have an adventure that takes them far. Things get worse, the landscape beautiful, great characters. In the genre of "All the Pretty Horses".

[Liz M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a superbly written book, well-paced. Durham doesn't lose his style and rhythm as so many writers do from the beginning to end. It's pretty violent and gruesome, but has a happy ending. I usually don't like happy endings because they're so predictable, but you're not sure how this one's going to end up 'til the last bit. Well, if you read this, then maybe I've spoiled it for you.

[Walt · Rating 2 out of 5]

The majority of this book is about a 15 year-old boy witnessing a bunch of cowboys he is riding with murder, maim, and rape...without protest on his part. In the end, after nearly drowning, he decides to go home. Spare me!!!
If you really want to read a great book about blacks pioneering the West, read "The Personal Story of Rachel DuPree" by Ann Weisgarber.

[Mary Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice coming of age story set in the sod-buster days of the great plains and old west, told from an African American perspective. Very evocative descriptions of location and period. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Maha · Rating 4 out of 5]

While not a novel that I would normally have picked up were I not simply trawling through the library looking for something to read, I found it engaging and illustrative of a history that I had hardly considered.

[Rolien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written book set in the time of slavery in America. I didn't know a lot about this time, but Durham made it very much alive for me.

[Joani · Rating 4 out of 5]

So good on so many levels!

[Clinton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a 3.5 star read. David Anthony Durham crafts a compelling narrative that can be summed in an early quote, "'Ye cannot escape God's laws, God's sight, God's blessing, and God's judgment.'"

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different coming-of-age story. Themes of good vs. evil, the grass is greener, etc. Ending was quite tense. Enjoyed it.

[Jinx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some brutality in this tale set in the wild west but a good story.

[Ilonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a western. A great little western. Read it.