"In the Glorious Fields" by Emily Hayse

So, I inhaled this book.  In a day and a half.  That was the fastest I could read it, snatching paragraphs between cleaning my house for a visit from my in-laws, teaching my kids, and running various errands.  If I could have read it in one sitting, I would have, just to make ripping the Band-aid off go faster.  No lie:  I was very worried about what would happen in this book.

I'm going to love this book, the second time I read it, now that I know what happens to whom.  Right now, I'm almost a little numb from the sweeping emotions and powerful rightness of the finale.  I won't say this book "destroyed" or "wrecked" me, because if it had done that, I would never read it again.  This book satisfied me.  Very, very much so.  But it also brought me to tears several times, though most of those were at the end over happy things.  That's normal for me.  I cry more over wishes getting granted and hope being proven justified than over deaths and disasters.

This is the third and final book in the Knights of Tin and Lead trilogy, which retells the King Arthur legends as magical-realism westerns.  And, like the two books before it (These War-Torn Hands and The Beautiful Ones), it is drenched in golden beauty.  The characters view the plains and the mountains, the hills and the valleys, with a kind of joyful reverence that I whole-heartedly embrace.  Because I know exactly what it feels like to stand in the wind-swept vastness of the American West and rejoice to be so insignificant in the face of so much bold country.  I'm not sure any writer I've read has ever captured that feeling before, and I love it.

But I love the characters more.  Well, all except two, but I am happy to say they meet their just and deserved ends.  Moral balance is restored.  At great cost, yet, but restored.  I am pleased.

I'm contributing this review to the blog tour Emily Hayse put together for this book.  You can find out more about her at the following places:

Author Website

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Particularly Good Bits:

To talk with the one you love is a wonderful thing, but to exist in peaceable quiet together, perfectly happy and content, is an understanding some never achieve (p. 56).

"Strangers have to become friends pretty quick out here if they're going to survive" (p. 131).

During all my years as a wanderer and an outcast, I had given up hope.  To feel it again is strange, ill-fitting.  But I could get used to it.  I turn my face to the north and I do not look back again (p. 361).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for western violence, including mention of beatings and torture, and lots of peril.  No cussing, no smut, no gore.

This has been my 9th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022, though, to be very honest, it never sat on my TBR shelves at all.  I started reading it as soon as I had it in hand.  This is my most-anticipated book release this year, and I am so, so happy to know how it ends now!!!