Gil Adamson

Spoiler alert: This review contains spoilers for Gil Adamson's previous book, The Outlander.

It's late 1917. The Great War is on. And William Moreland, known as the Ridgerunner, has resumed his running and robbery. This time, it's to support his son, Jack, who has been left without a mother and in the temporary custody of Sister Beatrice, a former nun who helped the family out throughout Jack's life and in his mother's last illness. But the nun didn't get the memo about the "temporary" part show more of things and takes it most personally when Jack heads back to the family cabin. So she puts a price on his head. Like father, like son...

The Outlander is one of my favourite books, and I couldn't believe the reading public's good fortune when it was announced that this sequel was being published. Adamson's writing is rich but measured, vivid but not flowery. There are moments where I laughed out loud, some where I reacted with audible dismay (I'd either not read or forgotten the contents of the blurb, so that was an upsetting moment when the story first mentioned that Mary was dead), and some where I was totally surprised. I couldn't put this down and finished it in a weekend. And now I want to turn right around and read the first book again.

I would recommend this if you liked The Outlander, or Guy Vanderhaeghe's Western trilogy, or True Grit. show less

Well, if I had read this book before the 2009 Canada Reads contest I would have had divided loyalties about which I wanted to win. As it was I had only read The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant and The Book of Negroes and there was no contest about which I wanted to win. I thought The Book of Negroes was a fantastic book and I was very happy when it did win the contest. But if I had read The Outlander before I would have been hard pressed to say which I liked better. They both have strong show more female characters and each faces horrible physical and mental challenges. And since this book is set in a part of Canada that I am very familiar with I have an immediate affinity for it.

The dogs are chasing Mary Boulton, referred to most of the time as simply, "the widow". She's a nineteen year-old widow who murdered her husband with his own gun. The dogs belong to her two brothers-in-law who are bound to make her pay for her crime. She heads off into the Alberta wilderness with no idea where she's going, just that she has to keep going. And the brothers are in hot pursuit. Will they catch her?

But it is not simply the chase that is so compelling, it is the author's talent in describing the Alberta wilderness with such detail and accuracy that the reader is there. Her characters, and they are characters: a whiskey brewing giant, a boxing pastor, an entrepreneurial dwarf and, a strong silent type romantic interest known as the ridgerunner, all become real and interesting and alive on the page.

Despite the fact that the widow clearly did the crime, the reader can't help but come to like her and want her to evade her pursuers and attain some happiness. For a while it seems she just might do that until the town in which she eventually settles, Frank, Alberta, is devastated by a landslide, even as her pursuers close in.

Let me just say that the structure of the book is such that it is almost impossible to put the book away. The chapter endings, usually, were stray threads that were not part of the main story but connected so that you just wanted to keep on reading to see how they fit into the weave of the main story. And I was so glad that the ending was such that Mary continued to be a strong woman fending for herself. show less

Gil Adamson's RIDGERUNNER is a very good book - beautiful writing, interesting characters with depth and backstories. I was caught up in these unusual lives - a lapsed, deeply disturbed and dangerous nun; a former U.S. Marshal/bounty hunter from the Oklahoma territory, now an old gunsmith/hermit; and of course the principals: the Ridgerunner himself, the eccentric William Moreland, first introduced in Adamson's previous book, OUTLANDER; his consort Mary Boulton, myterious heroine of that show more earlier book; and their son, Jack Boulton, just entering puberty. The setting is the high Rockies of Alberta, in and around the town of Banff in the years of the Great War. Most of the young men are gone. There is an internment camp near town, filed with "enemy aliens," Canadian emigrants from the enemy countries, mostly Ukrainians, who were rounded up and imprisoned the same way the U.S. interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. The plot concerns the future and welfare of the boy, Jack, whose father has disappeared on one of his many wanderings.

So, beautiful language, fascinating characters, okay? The problem - and it's a minor one really, because of those first two things - is that there's not a whole lot happening, not a lot of forward momentum in the story for the first 300 pages or so. It's all backstories and character development. Which is not all bad. I'm all for character-centered books. And it's all redeemed by the last hundred pages, when things really get rolling with the introduction of a vicious camp guard who comes after Jack, and what happens next. And whoo! Things suddenly start happening very quickly. Violence, very intense. Pages turn faster and faster. Followed by a great denouement and Epilogue. Making it all worth the journey. This Gil [Gillian] Adamson is one hell of a writer. Start with OUTLANDER, then read this one. Very, very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

My goodness, this woman Gil Adamson can spin a spell-binding, compelling hum-dinger of a yarn! She hooked me from page one of THE OUTLANDER, with her image of a black-garbed girl, initially identified only as "the widow," fleeing for her life, pursued by men and dogs across the sparsely settled wilderness of the Canadian West. The year is 1903, and we quickly learn her name is Mary Boulton, she is but nineteen years old and "Widowed by her own hand." A murder mystery then, which unfolds show more slowly and artfully over the next 400 pages, with a graceful and precise prose, the like of which is rarely found in contemporary fiction, although I must confess I was almost immediately reminded of another beautiful book I recently read and reviewed: Amanda Coplin's THE ORCHARDIST.

There are many wonderfully quirky characters here, from a mad Royal Canadian Mountie and a pugilist preacher to a dwarf storekeeper and a hermit mountain man (the love interest). And the villains of the piece are giant red-headed twins who chase our heroine for many months across the trackless wilderness and even over the Continental Divide with a coldly fierce relentlessness that brings to mind the posse that pursued Butch and Sundance. But the best character of all is "the widow" herself, who becomes even more mysterious and mesmerizing as the story develops and we learn more of her past and what brought her to her present predicament. What we have here is a murder mystery, a suspense thriller, a love story, a little Canadian history (the "Frank Slide" figures into the story's climax and denouement rather prominently), and a very literary Western. Yeah, all those things, really! It's like Prego spaghetti sauce - it's all in there! And, speaking of Prego, there's another minor charactaer, a gigantic Italian catskinner named Giovanni, who provides moonshine to the primitive mining town of Frank.

This is an adventure story extraordinaire, lemme tell ya. And the ending itself is both unexpected and perfect. I loved this book, and will recommend it highly. show less