The Last Crossing

Rating:
Summary: Great storis of thw old west makes this a entertaining novel
Review: Hard to get into but when it does it's a great novel.It's fullof suspence,adventure,romance and action everything a novel should have.Parts do drag on and those parts are hard to get through becouse they are the first 100 when you get passed that you'll love this book.

Rating:
Summary: Duty, honor, and love, sublimely rendered
Review: Once in awhile, a book comes along that haunts its readers' thoughts for years. The Last Crossing is such a book.

Set in the latter part of the 1800s, in the western U.S. and Canada, and in Victorian England, this is a tale of a a man lost in the wilderness, and those who seek to find him, including his very stiff British father, two very different brothers, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a quirky journalist, a saloon-keeper, and an Indian guide. They all suffer from painful pasts that taunt them into life-changing courses of action.

Telling the story from their own points of view, the characters look back at their own lives. This drives each of them to live up to their sense of duty, to defend their own honor, and ultimately to act in one way or another because they either love, or can't love.

Scenes of the early west tear at the heart--caravans, Indian villages, conflicts, battles, disease, death, tragedy, comic relief. And love, sometimes unrequited, and at a distance. There is one scene that will stay with me for years. In it, two lovers find each other, their desperate searches ending and beginning in an instant. The night air, the stars, the prairie wind and their hearts carry them to where they couldn't dream of going.

The characters speak with undeniable truth to and about themselves. They narrate, but also wonder about their own personal honor and how they can love despite their pasts and the hard lessons that duty and love teach them.

Rating:
Summary: Top-notch
Review: The good news is that Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe has published six other books besides this one. This is important because once you finishedhis new novel "The Last Crossing" you will be scouring libraries, bookstores, and the internet for more.

What a good writer! His 1996 novel "The Englishman's Boy" was also excellent, but his newest book reaches an even higher level. His use of multiple points of view is marvelous and the characters have a depth and appeal that adds excitement, pathos, and surprise to a really good plot.

In the 1870's, a young Englishman named Simon Gaunt travels into Montana as a missionary and vanishes. His difficult, heartbroken father orders his two other sons to go to Ft. Benton and find him at all costs. Addington is a disgraced military man and Simon's twin Charles is a painter disappointed in himself for his own shallow nature. Charles is desperate to find Simon but Addington seems to look on the whole trip as one big outdoor adventure, showing up at the fort with a seedy, sycophantic "newspaperman" who plans to record Addington's feats in the wilderness for the penny press. They contract the Blackfoot/Scottish guide Jerry Potts to lead them, but by the time the Gaunts' wagons leave Ft. Benton, they have also collected a woman searching for her sister's killer and are trailed by the man who loves her, and who in turn is trailed by his best friend. The search for the missing missionary is in danger of being derailed by the quirks and passions of his search party. But Simon Gaunt remains the lodestar for this group, and only later do we find out why.

"The Last Crossing" is satisfying, readable, thoughtful, and thrilling. If you have not read Guy Vanderhaeghe before, he is a wonderful discovery.