A girl, her guns, and a quest for revenge
Aug. 4th, 2020 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileWhen Lyndsay Ely’s Gunslinger Girl debuted, the launch party was in the upstairs bar at Trident Booksellers, and the authorial interview portion was conducted by Erin Bowman on the basis that she had also written a YA western with a female lead. While the two books are very different, “YA western with female lead” has enough points of interest in common with Gunslinger Girl that I made sure to pick up a trade paperback of Vengeance Road at the party. (It helps that it has a beautiful cover.)
While those unfamiliar with the genre might assume that YA has a limit on how gory it’s allowed to be, those persons are wrong, and Vengeance Road is a nonstop grand guignol of shoot-outs, fires, natural disasters, and… well, more shoot-outs, mostly. It’s great. The story starts when a gang of outlaws burns down protagonist Kate’s house and murders her dad, stealing his treasure map to an abandoned gold mine in the Arizona desert. Kate very sensibly decides to hunt down this entire gang of outlaws and personally murder each one of them, despite the protestations of various other people she comes across who think she should let it go and do something less likely to get herself killed. Sidekicks she picks up over the course of this quest include her pony, her dad’s horse, the two oldest sons of her dad’s (also dead now) friend Abe, a genre-savvy Apache girl who makes fun of her constantly, and a crazy old German guy who lives in the desert. The oldest of the two sons of Abe, Jesse, is telegraphed from his first appearance as the love interest; he follows a fairly standard love interest arc of being tortured and insufferable and eventually sort of getting over it, but also helping Kate get slightly less tortured and insufferable. But mostly he just helps Kate shoot her way across the Arizona Territory in search of the gang in search of the gold mine. It is a lot of old-fashioned straight-up cowboy bullshit, updated for the 21st century where girls can do stuff now and in hindsight maybe the Apaches had good reason to keep raiding the white settlers who kept building shitty mining towns on their land.
I feel like I ought to have more to say about this given how much I liked it, but really I just picked it up, sat my ass in a chair with a can of watermelon beer, zipped through the whole thing in a few hours, put it down, and went “Dang, that was a really good Western.” So… yeah. It’s a really good Western. Got all that really good Western shit. I hear the companion novel has more trains; I might check that one out sometime too.
While those unfamiliar with the genre might assume that YA has a limit on how gory it’s allowed to be, those persons are wrong, and Vengeance Road is a nonstop grand guignol of shoot-outs, fires, natural disasters, and… well, more shoot-outs, mostly. It’s great. The story starts when a gang of outlaws burns down protagonist Kate’s house and murders her dad, stealing his treasure map to an abandoned gold mine in the Arizona desert. Kate very sensibly decides to hunt down this entire gang of outlaws and personally murder each one of them, despite the protestations of various other people she comes across who think she should let it go and do something less likely to get herself killed. Sidekicks she picks up over the course of this quest include her pony, her dad’s horse, the two oldest sons of her dad’s (also dead now) friend Abe, a genre-savvy Apache girl who makes fun of her constantly, and a crazy old German guy who lives in the desert. The oldest of the two sons of Abe, Jesse, is telegraphed from his first appearance as the love interest; he follows a fairly standard love interest arc of being tortured and insufferable and eventually sort of getting over it, but also helping Kate get slightly less tortured and insufferable. But mostly he just helps Kate shoot her way across the Arizona Territory in search of the gang in search of the gold mine. It is a lot of old-fashioned straight-up cowboy bullshit, updated for the 21st century where girls can do stuff now and in hindsight maybe the Apaches had good reason to keep raiding the white settlers who kept building shitty mining towns on their land.
I feel like I ought to have more to say about this given how much I liked it, but really I just picked it up, sat my ass in a chair with a can of watermelon beer, zipped through the whole thing in a few hours, put it down, and went “Dang, that was a really good Western.” So… yeah. It’s a really good Western. Got all that really good Western shit. I hear the companion novel has more trains; I might check that one out sometime too.