Gabriel's Story : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Good Stuff -That's all I wanted to say.
Review: Gabriel's story is about Gabriel, a young guy who have to move to the plans with his mom and her new husband. Gabriel hates his new life, he's used to the city life. So, when a group of horsemen come to town, Gabriel and his friend James, don't hesitate to be workers for the horsemen and leave town with them. But the horsemen turn out to be brutal killers, and want let the boys leave... The story had such wonderful discription, of the plains, and landscapes. This novel is one you don't want to miss.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I ever read
Review: Here is my reaction to one of the best books I have ever read. The book is "Gabriel's Story" by David Anthony Durham. The action takes place in the 1870's. The protagonist is Gabriel, an African-American youth who has just turned 16. The other characters are his brother Ben, just turned 14; his step-father, Solomon; his mother, and his uncle. Gabriel's parents were freed slaves. After their freedom, they lived in Baltimore, where Gabriel enjoyed the big city life. Then his father dies, and his mother decides to go west to Kansas to join and marry her first love, Solomon. The two were separated by slavery. Gabriel doesn't realize that they were in love before this time. Gabriel resents his mother's remarriage and the hard life homesteading on the Kansas prairie. He has all of a teenager's resentment of everything with something real to pin them on. He makes a friend, an African-American orphan his age whose name is James. Together the boys decide to join a group of cowboys and help them drive some horses west to Texas. What the boys don't realize is that these are very bad men they have fallen in with -- the very worst men there could be. As the trip begins, Gabriel and James gradually discover what these men really are, and now their greatest desire is to get away from them. The rest of the novel contains their picaresque travels with the men, trying to leave the men, and trying to return to Kansas. The author has done a marvelous job with this book. The plot is exciting and adventurous, with many twists and turns. The characters and their relationships are complex. The description is wonderful. I felt I was with Gabriel every step of the way on his journey. On Sunday I read in a frenzy from 2 to 6 because I couldn't stop until I finished this book. At times my heart was pounding and I almost stopped breathing as I said aloud, "Oh, no!" I was so involved in this. In addition, the author's writing is beautiful and eloquent. I wouldn't have predicted that I would fall in love with a book one might call a "Western," but this novel defies categorization. The aspect of African Americans homesteading is unusual and interesting. I immediately wrote to the author to thank him for this book, and I hope other people will enjoy it as well. It might be a good one to recommend to teens.

Rating:
Summary: All glowing book review cliches apply
Review: Page-turner, can't put it down, tour de force, and all those other cliches apply to Gabriel's Story. Actually, I could put it down, but only because I had to. Couldn't wait to pick it up again.

Gabriel's Story is an amazing adventure -- perfectly plausible -- of a teen aged African American in the 1870's who leaves his family's Kansas farm unannounced. He and a friend join a crew of cowboys headed for Texas....

How to tell more of the book without giving away bits and pieces of the story that is best discovered by the reader? Can't be done.

Suffice it to say that Gabriel sees and experiences more than he could ever had imaganed. He is handicapped by racism, his youth and inexperience, but boasts the distinct advantages of intelligence and a good heart.

If you're overly sensitive to violence, beware; but it all rings true to the times and is never gratuitous.

Now stop reading reviews of the book and buy it, you'll be glad you did.

Rating:
Summary: Many Levels, Many Reasons
Review: Pretty much all the reviewers so far have loved this book. There's just one guy who dissented, but I guess there's always gonna be one that doesn't catch on. For my part, I'd like to join in the chorus of enthusiasm for this novel. It works, and it works on many levels. At the simplest level it's an adventure story. Woven into that is a coming of age tale. Layered on that is a dialogue between good and evil, between the best and worst in men's natures. Add the back and forth between the life of homesteaders and that of cowboys, two dual and sometimes dueling aspects of the American frontier experience. There's a young black man discovering the natural world and relating to it in a way I've never seen in African-American literature. There's the turmoil of a mother watching her young sons become men, for better and worse. There's the anguish of a man who's family has died tragically. There's the strange legacy of slavery as manifest through two characters who don't even understand how they fit into that tragedy.

All this and more can be found in this exceptional novel. I guess not everyone will engage with it so completely, but if any of these themes sound interesting to you I encourage you to delve into this book. It's all there, and an attentive reader will be well rewarded.

Rating:
Summary: Worhty of 5 stars or more
Review: Rarely do I read a book in one sitting, but I felt I had no choice in this one. I wish more books that I picked up held my interest, my imagination, and my heart as well as this one has. The main character, Gabriels, tells us a story of the American West in a unique manner far different than the "typical Western" we know. I highly recommend this book to those who are tired of cliches and formulas. I'm glad I found this little treasure.

Rating:
Summary: Finally. Talent!
Review: The characters a full-bodied and mature. The story is heart-breaking and real to the core. One sympathizes with the protagonists and wishes the antagonists straight to hell. Now that is what I call a good novel. Durham has done a fabulous job...

Rating:
Summary: The prodigal son returns
Review: The prodigal son always comes home. Iin life, in parable and in literature.

And he has returned once more in "Gabriel's Story," a haunting debut by David Anthony Durham. In this incarnation, the wayward youth is a 15-year-old African-American boy in the empty middle of a continent, caught between youth and manhood, naiveté and wisdom, family and flight.

Fleeing racism in Reconstruction-era Baltimore, Gabriel Lynch travels with his mother and younger brother to his stepfather's hard-scrabble homestead in 1870s Kansas. As with the Biblical story of the prodigal son, Gabriel finds the "outside" world less exciting and more threatening than he dreamed. He returns to Kansas wiser and chastened, prepared to take his place behind the plow and, more importantly, at the family hearth. "Gabriel's Story" is a classical bildungsroman -- a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character -- told in masterful prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy.

His is not just a startlingly poetic African-American voice (Durham is the son of Trinidadian immigrants), but a welcome new voice in the rich spectrum of American letters, where authors should -- and must -- be judged in different shades of black and white: The color of words on a page.

Rating:
Summary: Congrats on a Splendid First Novel
Review: When I consider buying a book I look it over asking two questions. One, does the author have a story to tell? Two, does he or she have the skills to tell that story compellingly? As far as "Gabriel's Story" is concerned, the answer is yes on both counts. The story is strong both because it has a tight spine along which the narrative progresses and because the author picks up on an under-acknowledged feature of the American West, namely the role African-Americans played in its history. The novel educates, but it does so effortlessly, so that a reader is transported along on an adventure tale, probably not even noticing how much the novel adds new dimensions to writing about the West. As for the author's skills... He's got it. The narrative reads like some combination of "Lonesome Dove" and "Paradise", somehow spliced together with a cinematographer's eye for horizon-lines, with a soft heart for the family scenes and a keen eye for the violent passages. And it even has a satisfying ending. That's rare these days and seems especially hard for first novelists to pull off. Congrats to the author.

Rating:
Summary: Finally. Talent!
Review: Yes, Kansas was and is a Great Plains state, and anyone who first arrives might say, "I can't believe I'm in Kansas."

Kansas is an acquired taste, and Gabriel Lynch, a youngster frresh from the big eastern city of Baltimore, could not quite discover the tastefulness of farm life. Not many teens today could either. But they should read "Gabriel's Story" anyway.

This coming of age drama by David Anthony Durham has Gabriel run away from his mom and new step-dad to join up with a motley crew of vicious criminals. Gabriel soon learns to cherish a more simple life.

One might say he learned a lesson: Be loyal to your family. They're not as bad as you think.

Larry Rochelle, author of DEATH & DEVOTION: A Palmer Morel Mystery