Title: Wildfire
Author: Zane Grey
Read copy: eBook (Kindle)
Published: September 2, 2014
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
ASIN: B00IUPCLDG
In a land of red cliffs and towering stone monuments, with the brooding Colorado River running through it, the unmatched Zane Gray sets his classic novel about a rancher, a blood feud, and a horse named...Wildfire
Bostic, a powerful rancher with a strong-willed 18-year-old daughter, has lost track of Lucy's wanderings. Caught up in a feud with two families, running his empire with an iron fist, Bostic does not know that Lucy has met a man who chased a horse called Wildfire for weeks and months, hundreds of miles, across a canyon and a river...As soon as Lin Sloan, Lucy's strange rider, joins Bostic and his men, they are confronted by a brazen horse thief and an explosion of violence long coming. While Lucy has been chasing her freedom, and riding the wild horse that can only be ridden when he chooses, someone has been hunting her. Bostic and Sloan see the danger, but it's too late: Lucy's fate is in the hands of a brutal killer—and only killing can set her free.
My rating:
***eBook available for free on Amazon***
Lucy Bostil has been a tomboy all her life, riding the most willful horses, doing anything she pleases, more than content with her life, but when she meets Lin Sloan, she learns she hasn't yet lived her life to the fullest.
Sloan has followed the wild horse he's named Wildfire for months and across thousands of miles before he captured him. When Lucy stumbles across him on one of her rides, both man and untamed horse fall for the spirited young woman, but danger is looming ever closer and both man and beast will strike a hard bargain to save the woman they love.
This is far from height of literature, and let's face it, the love story, hidden between these pages, is rather cheesy and not very-well written. I could even say Zane Grey is an acquired taste. A taste that I appreciate.
I don't read his stories for the plots or the romance or the characters. I love his stories for his descriptive narrative style. When I read the scenes with Sloan stubbornly following Wildfire through the desert, the high plains, and the monumental canyons, images rise in front of my eyes as if I was watching a movie. As if I was there.
I rode alongside Lucy that day when she ventured into the valley of monuments and found Wildifire, Nagger and Sloan, I sat beside old man (and utter bastard) Bostil as he watched the first race between Sage Kind and Wildfire, I was there on the arduous trek through the canyons with Lucy and her pursuer, and I trembled as I watched that last race-for-life through the blazing forest.
The story was nice and rather well-written, but merely an ornament to the imagery and descriptions of the vast plains, deep canyons, the roaring Colorado and the fields of sage. The romance and that last few suspenseful chapters were merely a bonus.
5 stars, cowboys/ranchers/western, favorites, fiction, freebie, historical, re-read, suspense/mystery/adventure/thriller, Zane Grey
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