Moon Medicine

This is my third Mike Blakely novel and I have not been disappointed with any of them.

The story is sort of a fictional autobiography told by a man who is 99 years old. He tells his story starting in France where he is an orphan who as a teenager commits a murder and escapes to sail to America to start a new life. He has many adventures revealing what life was like in the 1840's as a trader with indian tribes in Texas/New Mexico during the war with Mexico.

The stories he tells are literally hair raising, funny at times, thrilling at others. Blakely has a talent do drawing you into the action with his way of story telling. I liked how the old man would talk to you as though he was telling his story from his home.

Blakely is different from show more most writers of American western fiction. He is not one dimensional, characters can be heroic one moment and evil in another. He is sensitive to the native indian plight and other than just characterizing them as hostile redskins to be wiped out, he reveals the human side of their life in all his books.

A well deserved 5 stars for this novel. show less

Have you ever read a Western fantasy? I thought that I'd picked up a regular Western when I checked out Moon Medicine, but it definitely has some fantasy elements to it. The narrator and hero of the book seems to be some kind of superman, but I overlooked that and really loved the book. Blakely throws in a lot of authentic Western info and the background of his story is in the plains of Texas. How could I resist that? I wondered after reading Summer of Pearls if he could write another as good and he succeeded. He doesn't write the same story twice, but so far every one has been a winner.