"Sitka" by Louis L'Amour

Basically, Sitka is an origin story for the state of Alaska.

I'm not even joking.

Jean LaBarge grows up in the swamps of Pennsylvania before heading off into the wilderness and ending up a young man on the California coast.  He spends a lot of time on sailing ships.  He gets big and tough and true-hearted, like all the best L'Amour heroes.  He keeps in touch with his childhood best friend, who stays in the East and becomes an important politician.

And he obsesses over Alaska.

Now, having been obsessed with Alaska myself since I was 11 years old, I understand that last bit.  There's something kind of magical about even just the name.  Alaska.  

I actually bought my copy of this book while in Alaska last August.  (I bought it in Skagway, not Sitka, but that doesn't matter.)  It took me thirty-four years to get there -- quite a bit longer than it takes Jean LaBarge.  He gets there while it still belongs to Russia and helps to open up to the possibility of Russia selling it to the United States.  He also spends several months crossing Russia from the Pacific to the Atlantic.  He falls in love with a Russian princess, with a sort of classic Medieval courtly love, since she's already married to a really great guy.  He makes enemies and defeats them.  Lots of really exciting stuff happens in the best style of L'Amour's sweeping epics.

It took me six months to read the first 60 pages of this book, and three days to read the last 250.  Make of that whatever you want.

Particularly Good Bits:

It gleamed there on his calloused palm, heavy as sin in the heart of a man.  "If that isn't gold, what is it?" (p. 55).

To a fool time brings only age, not wisdom (p. 78).

It was a pity, he reflected, that the men of good will are so poorly armed, for at times it was a handicap not to hate (p. 169).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10 for some brawling and other non-gory violence, some references to bawdy houses, alcohol consumption by adults, scenes of children in peril, and mild innuendo about men's intentions toward women.  

This is my first book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list!

Did Someone Say "FREE Audiobook"???

I did, it was me.  I said free audiobook, and I meant FREE!!!

ONE Audiobooks, which has produced all of my audiobooks, picks one title from their catalog each month to let people listen to for free.  And, in March, that book is Dancing and Doughnuts, my Twelve Dancing Princesses retelling!

All you have to do is go to the OneAudiobooks website and follow the directions.  Once you save Dancing and Doughnuts to your account, you will have until June 1 to finish listening to it.

It's kind of like borrowing a book from the library, where you have a certain number of weeks to read it, and then you return it.  You don't get to download and keep the book for free, but you get to experience it for free within a certain timeframe.

If you're new to my books, I write cozy Christian westerns.  My Once Upon a Western series retells fairy tales as clean YA historical fiction.  These are non-magical westerns with no cussing or smut, containing sweet PG-level romances and mild violence only (think an old John Wayne movie from the 1950s).  

Dancing and Doughnuts is about a Civil War veteran trying to find work in a small Kansas town.  He takes a job trying to figure out who is spiking the refreshments served at a family-run dance hall.  Twelve sisters, uncountable doughnuts, rowdy cowboys -- nothing can stop our hero from solving this mystery and helping the family resolve some bigger problems in the process.

The audiobook version is read by Steve Corona, whose narration of my book One Bad Apple won a SOVA last year.  Steve has been my ideal narrator for Dancing and Doughnuts since the idea of audiobook editions for my books first entered my head, and he absolutely knocks this narration out of the park. Do yourself a favor and listen to it for free while you can!

"The Greatest Lawyer That Ever Lived: Patrick Henry at the Bar of History" by George Morrow

This is a slim volume containing two essays about Patrick Henry, both by George Morrow.  In both essays, the author contends that Patrick Henry is essentially a mystery to us today for two reasons.  

First, Patrick Henry wasn't obsessed with writing things down OR with keeping records of his writing and speeches for posterity.  He was very gifted as a defense attorney and as a public orator, but his speeches had a strange ability to make people agree with him at the same time as not be able to remember exactly what he said.  So even the speeches we think we know he made, George Morrow says are probably just vague approximations of what he said because Henry didn't keep the speeches he wrote and no one else could remember more than the basic gist of them.  Yes, including the famous "Give me liberty, or give me death speech."

Second, George Morrow makes a convincing case for Thomas Jefferson being virulently envious of Patrick Henry for decades because Henry was a much more accomplished lawyer than Jefferson and a much better public speaker.  Morrow contends that, after Patrick Henry's death, Thomas Jefferson began systematically and effectively erasing Patrick Henry's good qualities from public and private memory alike and replacing them with the idea that Patrick Henry was a mediocre lawyer who got a lucky day in court now and then, was a lazy and cowardly state governor, and so on. 

If nothing else, these two essays have convinced me I need to read more about Patrick Henry and not rely on my memories of what my high school history books said about him thirty years ago.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Nothing scandalous or untoward here.

This has been my second book read from my #RevolutionaryWarReads list!