Sundancer

Rating:
Summary: An ok read
Review:

No one quite writes Native American romances as excellently as Shirl Henke. Her latest tale, SUNDANCER, provides readers with her usual insight, detail, and authenticity, which she deftly wraps around a scorching love story. Sub-genre fans will adopt the two protagonists, who struggle to overcome their pasts in order to gain a shared future. Ms. Henke continues to serve as one of the models of providing an audience with a fantastic, extremely deep romance novel.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Readers will dance to Henke's latest Native American romance
Review:

Thinking back six years to 1861, Roxanna Fallon reflects on when her innocent childhood ended. One night a bushwhacker brutally murdered her father. Roxanna became a union spy, but now she is unsafe, broke, and wanted by the law. She flees to St. Louis to stay with a friend, Alexandra Hunt, who is dying from consumption. After Alexa dies, Roxanna, seeing a detective who is most likely after her, pretends to be Alexa and flees to California to marry the person selected by her deceased friend's grandfather as a spouse.

A Comanche raid leads to the masqueraded Roxanna being held captive. Alexa's grandfather, knowing the Indians hold her as their prisoner, hires the half-breed gunslinger Cain to rescue her, which he succeeds in doing. However, Alexa's fiancé rejects her as tainted goods, but Cain offers to marry her. Both have secrets to reveal before they can find happiness together. Cain turns to the ritual Sun Dance in a hope that this will free him to love Roxanna forever.

No one quite writes Native American romances as excellently as the much deservedly awarded Shirl Henke scribes them. Her latest tale, SUNDANCER, provides readers with her usual insight, detail, and authenticity, which she deftly wraps around a scorching love story. Sub-genre fans will adopt the two protagonists, who struggle to overcome their pasts in order to gain a shared future. Ms. Henke continues to serve as one of the models of providing an audience with a fantastic, extremely deep romance novel.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!!
Review: Shirl Henke does it again!! Produces another wonderful novel guaranteed to make you laugh and cry. Cain, so named because he killed his own brother, is such a tortured hero that your heart will cry out for him. Through the course of the novel, Cain learns to believe in himself. For if there ever is a man who needs to believe in himself and love himself, Cain is one. He despises the Indian side of him and yearns to be white. By reading the novel, you will learn what it is like to be caught between two worlds, neither very accepting of half-bloods. You will follow Cain's physical and emotional struggles to reach a goal that he neither knew he had and thought unatanable. This is a wonderful story!!

Rating:
Summary: Well-researched
Review: This review is meant as a comment on the one star review below. "A reader" says she only read about half of the book, yet she claims that Isobel's hunt for Roxanna should have rendered Isobel penniless, and that Shirl Henke omitted this post-Civil War reality about the impoverished South. Yet, this is exactly what Henke HAS incorporated in the story. Isobel meets with Roxanna and tells her she's become broke on account of the hunt, and asks her for money... So...before posting a comment, it might be worthwhile to read the whole book - you never know what's in the unread pages...

Sundancer is a book that seemingly effortlessly evokes a world of long ago, Shirl Henke has a vivid style that creates ballrooms, snubbing ladies, an endearing whisky-loving tycoon, lonely deserts, and True Love. A great book if you need a break yet want the easy read to be intelligently written.

Rating:
Summary: Needed: Better historical research!
Review: When an author makes a huge error in the construction of her historical "world" her credibility is completely lost. This novel is about the post-Civil War American West. But the American Civil War is important to the construction of Roxanna's character and what happens to her during the story (she was a Yankee spy) so it's important that Ms. Henke get her facts straight about the Civil War. Unfortunately, she failed.

There is absolutely no way Isobel Darby could have afforded a four year manhunt to track down Roxanna and persecute her while at the same time living the life of a pre-war Southern belle. It doesn't matter where she got the money (she inherited it from her late husband, a profiteer who stole from the Confederacy); what matters is that the inheritance would have been used up simply surviving during the War and Reconstruction. The inflation in the South was horrendous and Confederate money wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. So the main impetus of the story -- Roxanna's flight west to escape Isobel's persecution and harassment -- is totally incredible. Knowing that, why should we believe anything else portrayed in the story about the American West, the Indians, the building of the trains, etc.?

I only made it halfway through the book before I gave up and skimmed the rest. A historical novel is worthless when the "history" is really fantasy in disguise. It's too bad. Cain and Roxanna were interesting characters and their story had promise. It's just sad that the underpinnings to their story were completely unreliable.

SUNDANCER was the first of Ms. Henke's books that I've read. I'll probably give her one more chance and try THE ENDLESS SKY. Here's hoping, with fingers crossed, for better!

Rating:
Summary: Needed: Better historical research!
Review: When an author makes a huge error in the construction of her historical "world" her credibility is completely lost. This novel is about the post-Civil War American West. But the American Civil War is important to the construction of Roxanna's character and what happens to her during the story (she was a Yankee spy) so it's important that Ms. Henke get her facts straight about the Civil War. Unfortunately, she failed.

There is absolutely no way Isobel Darby could have afforded a four year manhunt to track down Roxanna and persecute her while at the same time living the life of a pre-war Southern belle. It doesn't matter where she got the money (she inherited it from her late husband, a profiteer who stole from the Confederacy); what matters is that the inheritance would have been used up simply surviving during the War and Reconstruction. The inflation in the South was horrendous and Confederate money wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. So the main impetus of the story -- Roxanna's flight west to escape Isobel's persecution and harassment -- is totally incredible. Knowing that, why should we believe anything else portrayed in the story about the American West, the Indians, the building of the trains, etc.?

I only made it halfway through the book before I gave up and skimmed the rest. A historical novel is worthless when the "history" is really fantasy in disguise. It's too bad. Cain and Roxanna were interesting characters and their story had promise. It's just sad that the underpinnings to their story were completely unreliable.

SUNDANCER was the first of Ms. Henke's books that I've read. I'll probably give her one more chance and try THE ENDLESS SKY. Here's hoping, with fingers crossed, for better!