"To the Far Blue Mountains" by Louis L'Amour

This second book about Barnabas Sackett was a lot of fun.  But I don't think I liked it quite as well as Sackett's Land, mostly because this one had more exciting adventures and less downtime to get to know the characters.  I commented to my husband a couple of times that L'Amour tosses his characters into one thrilling escapade after another so quickly that the reader really never has a chance to catch their breath between one set of heroics and the next.  Each adventure that befalls Barnabas was cool, but the pacing didn't quite hit me the way I'd like.

Barnabas Sackett is a cool dude, though, and no mistake.  You just can't keep him down.  He refuses to be daunted.  And I loved that.  I also loved a new character in this one: Lila, the maid to Barabas's intended.  She can swordfight and shoot a rifle, ride a horse all day and all night, cook so well that men will mutiny on her behalf, and is generally a completely awesome person.  I wish there was a book about her all on her own, because I bet it would be a roaringly good time.

Once again, Barnabas Sackett spends the bulk of this book just trying to get to America and set up a home there.  Which he does, eventually, but not before multiple shipboard battles, kidnappings, treasure hunts, and so on.  He and his wife do eventually build a home together, have kids, and raise those kids to adulthood.  But it takes quite a while to get there.

Particularly Good Bits:

We must not lose touch with what we were, with what we had been, nor must we allow the well of our history to dry up, for a child without tradition is a child crippled before the world.  Tradition can also be an anchor of stability and a shield to guard one from irresponsibility and hasty decision (p. 21).

I had never complained, for who cares for complaints?  If something is wrong, one does something (p. 64).

"I do not wish.  I do what becomes the moment.  If it be a cook-pot, I cook.  If it be a needle, I'll sew, but if it be a blade that is needed, I shall cut a swath" (p. 76).  (That's Lila, btw.  Precisely what I love about her, really!)

"The tongue of Wales is music, and you write it well" (p. 84).

How deep, how strange is the courage of women!  Courage is expected of a man, he is conditioned to it from childhood, and we in our time grew up in a world of wars and press-gangs, of highwaymen and lords sometimes as high-handed as they.  We grew up to expect hardship and war.  But a woman?  I'd seen them follow their men to war, seen them seeking over battlefields to find their lonely dead, or the wounded who would die but for them.  I have seen a woman pick up a man and carry him off the field to a place where he might have care (p. 129).

Where go the years?  Down what tunnel of time are poured the precious days? (p. 248)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for lots of violent fights, deaths, captures, escapes... but all told in non-gruesome or terrifying ways. It does have a handful of old-fashioned cuss words. 

This is my 11th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.