Shane
1920
- conduct of life
- fiction
- frontier and pioneer life
- vendetta
- homesteaders
- character
- respect
- fiction, westerns
- children's fiction
- cowboys, fiction
The story
Shane is about a lone man of high principle,who gets caught up in a range war between the cattlmen and farmers.He sides with the farmers when the cattlemen hire a professional gunfighter named Wilson,a man against which the farmers have no chance.Shane alone must save the day.Frontier justice at its best.Circa late eighteen hundreds.
What it’s like
Spare, plain-spoken prose with a clear-eyed, unhurried voice, told through the wondering eyes of a boy watching a stranger ride into a Wyoming valley. The world on the page is open grassland, river bottoms, log cabins, sagebrush and high mountain light, rendered with a sense of weather and work: dust on the trail, the smell of smoke and horses, the heavy quiet before trouble. The pace is steady and patient, with long stretches of ordinary farm life carrying the story toward a few sharp, sudden moments of confrontation. Its mood is a melancholy kind of gentleness, a wistful dignity about manners, loyalty and a man who keeps his past to himself. Violence is present but restrained: one gunfight near the climax, brief and not graphic, with some fear and menace in the threats leading up to it. It suits a slow afternoon, a quiet reread, or a long evening with a warm drink, and it is especially good for readers who want an old-fashioned western built on character and conscience rather than gore or cynicism, and for younger readers who can handle a grave, serious tone.
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