In 1896, Leo Hayes was born into two large Mormon pioneer families who settled in the Snake River basin of southeastern Idaho. They doted on his blond hair and bright blue eyes. By 1910 he graduated eighth grade. His father couldn’t afford to send him to a boarding school to further his education, so he worked on the sugar beet farm and cattle ranch his father managed. One day his father hired a … a 22 year old cowboy named Sean McKay to ride the fences and check brands until the fall roundup. Leo worked with the cowboy. They became friends. Sean taught Leo the cowboy arts and how to play the guitar. They fell in love. Sean taught Leo the arts of love. In the fall, Sean hired Leo to accompany him on the fall roundup and cattle drive for a huge neighboring cattle ranch. For the next four years they drove cattle and relished the rugged life of travel and adventure as cowboy sidekicks. But during those short years, they saw less and less cattle drives being organized. Farmers homesteaded the open lands and protected their fields with barbed wire fences, blocking the trails. Railroads proliferated during this time, making long drives to big rail heads back east unnecessary. The romantic age of the American cowboy drew to a close.
In 1914 the young lovers returned to Idaho. They used their savings and bought a small stud ranch close to Leo’s family. They wanted to breed and raise prime cattle and fine horses, thus keeping their hands in their chosen cowboy trades. They lived in the old barn’s tack room while they began their stud ranch operation. They needed a house so they ordered a mail order bungalow from Sears Roebuck & Company to be delivered by rail. They were house raising when Leo’s life took a sharp turn in a totally unexpected direction.
Sean took sick with typhoid fever. Not wanting to leave Leo alone should the worst happen, Sean secretly handfasted their neighbor friend, Muriel Anne. Sean wanted to leave Leo a gift of love, so Sean and Muriel Anne secretly conspired to make a baby while she nursed him. After a lingering illness, Sean died. Devastated, Leo sank into depression. After Muriel Anne knew she was pregnant, she gave Leo a letter where Sean explained he wanted Leo to marry Muriel Anne and raise Sean’s child to remember him by. Reluctantly, Leo agreed to marry Muriel Anne. Muriel Anne’s mother invited the handsome new pastor of Pocatello’s Episcopal Trinity Church to conduct the ceremony. The pastor stayed with Leo in the new Sears bungalow. They immediately felt attracted to each other. The randy pastor demonstrated his English public school ways of athletic sex for sport and recreation. After the wedding, Leo consummated the marriage with Muriel Anne, only to discover sex with a woman did not feel natural to him. He needed a man for love and romance. A woman just would not do.
more
I TRULY Wanted to Like This One…
I really did try! I couldn’t wait to finish it in the hopes that it would redeem itself by the end…
It didn’t.
98% of the offerings I review here are tired rehashes of the same formula where two characters spend the entire novel speaking to the reader in first person narrative with no effort put into supporting characters or details of place, space and atmosphere. This novel is NOTHING like that which is why I thought to myself “Finally! Someone that knows how to really write!” as I dove further into it but that joy was very short lived.
The old adage states, “Write what you know.” and Idaho/Utah native Goodman clearly knows and loves his region’s history in this attempt at a sweeping, turn-of-the-century cowboy epic. While most authors who choose to write a cowboy story because they think cowboys are hot will toss in a couple details about spurs or sweeping plains here and there, Goodman does the exact opposite and bogs his story down with so much detail it actually gets ridiculous. There’s painting the picture and then there’s completely over painting it and Goodman simply just doesn’t know when to put the brush down constantly focusing on superfluous details that simply have nothing to do with the plot and only serve as annoying jabs to the readers ribs in a “Hey look how well I did my homework!” way. DISCREET is a great example of what can happen when an author either doesn’t work with a credible editor or, does, and then pays zero attention to their advice.
My other major issues with this read are with the structure. The novel is structured in such a way that one present day character is actually telling the story of his ancestor to his boyfriend and this treatment is superfluous and annoying. These characters are not only completely one dimensional but they serve no function other than to jarringly take the reader out of the story for no apparent purpose whatsoever. If you’re going to bring us back to present day then those characters also must have their own story, their own drama and conflict along with their own resolution at the end. Without that, all you have is unnecessary interruptions.
The most glaring amateur hour mistake Goodman makes is one that almost makes his book completely unreadable. When illustrating that characters speak with an accent it is completely unnecessary to phonetically spell out what you think an Irish or low country accent sounds like EVERY time a character speaks.
Excerpt:
“Yes, sir, Mister Hayes, ol’ man Henderson o’ th’ big Lazy H Ranch, a ways east o’ here, tol’ me that ‘e won’t need me fer a month or so, an’ then I’ll be startin’ th’ fall round up. I’ll be drivin’ ‘is herd t’ their winter pastures down south o’ here, down close t’ Durango, Colorado, pert near. So, ‘e says that maybe yew could use some help, temporary like, an’ for me t’ ride over an’ offer me services since ya don’t have cowhands permanent, so ‘e said, don’t ya know.”
Since every character in the book has an accent, tragically, the ENTIRE book is written like this and it’s absolute proof a real editor never touched it for no editor worth their iPad would allow such a travesty. All any author has to do is state what the character said then follow it up with “But it came out sounding like ___with his heavy Irish accent” and you’re done. You can write everything from that point forward as usual letting your reader hear it in their head without having to unnecessarily hammer your point home with every subsequent line of dialogue you write.
The discovery of our young protagonists’ sexuality (as well as the sex in general) is poorly handled. Young, sheltered, farm boy Leo running off with his handsome cowboy crush Sean on a cattle drive should technically be full of moments of exhilarating self discovery, frightening self doubt, and much drama and conflict but our two heroes, pair up, hook up and nobody (including themselves) seems to give it much thought. While I agree with Goodman in that such pairings were indeed commonplace and generally accepted during that era, it doesn’t make for a very interesting read when nobody seems to care that Sean and Leo are together. I kept on reading, fully expecting the one homophobic cowboy out of the group to come forward and stir up trouble… but he never did. I continued on, fully expecting one of the other cowboys to turn out to be an ex-trail partner of Sean’s and have his jealousy rear its ugly head and possibly manifest itself in an evil or tragic way… but it never happened. The most drama we’re treated to is a series of pranks Leo and another young character with a crush on Sean play on each other. Even the opportunity to really amp up the action with a run in with some cattle rustlers is completely wasted. There’s no kidnapping of Leo, no rescue, no gunfight or even a good brawl. (The whole episode is over in seconds after a couple shots fired.) So, as it turns out, cattle drives are actually pretty fu&*ing boring which is not good news for us as this one provides a rather large chunk of the narrative. By the time Goodman finally manages to lay a nice bit of conflict and drama on us with both a funeral and a wedding back to back, it’s just too late.
The real tragedy here is that Goodman has all the tools he needs to give us beautifully drawn characters in vivid settings with great drama, he just has absolutely no clue how to balance his ingredients. A good editor can take his expertly researched, beautifully detailed visions and really turn them into the 5 star reads that they deserve to be.
(I have downloaded book two: Growing Pains to see if it gets any better so stay tuned…)