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Improbable Fortunes by Jeffrey Price
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Improbable Fortunes (edition 2016)

by Jeffrey Price (Author)

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Winner of the 2016 Laramie Awards for Western Fiction Longlisted for a Reading the West Book Award Finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Best Fiction Finalist for the High Plains Book Awards InImprobable Fortunes, Jeffrey Price takes us on a wild ride into Vanadium, a dusty, down-on-its-heels mining town in southwest Colorado--where it would be fair to assume that nothing has ever happened. But you'd be wrong. As it turns out, quite a lot has happened, starting with a suspicious mudslide that destroys the town's Main Street and a cowboy, Buster McCaffrey, arrested for the death of one of the richest men in America, Marvin Mallomar. As the soon-to-retire Sheriff, Shep Dudival, investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder, it comes to light that Buster and Mallomar's young wife were having a Cowboy Always Rings Twice affair. From there, Price takes this familiar story plot and turns it on its head--folding a rococo cast of Vanadium's characters into a timeline that begins with Vanadium's post-WWII labor strife and ends with the Kulturkampf of present day. While it may all seem humorous and surreal at first blush, one gets the feeling byImprobable Fortunes' unguessable conclusion that Price has used the fictitious town of Vanadium--a place without a recognizable gas station, a decent restaurant, or a clean bathroom--as the Rosetta Stone for something larger.… (more)
Member:davidabrams
Title:Improbable Fortunes
Authors:Jeffrey Price (Author)
Info:Archer (2016), 400 pages
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Improbable Fortunes by Jeffrey Price

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This book is as improbable as the title suggests but is all the more fun because of it.

Set in Vanadium, a town built around a worked-out uranium mine in South West Colorado, "Improbable Fortunes" tells the story of a likeable, impeccably honest, and almost unbelievably naïve, ranch hand called Buster,

The story opens with a dramatic and slightly zany disaster, involving a mud slide a destroyed luxury ranch house that is, for some reason, full of cattle, a damsel in distress and Buster, apparently to blame for it all.

Most of the rest of the book is spent recounting Buster's progress towards this event from his birth onwards.

Abandoned at birth, Buster is raised by a variety of foster parents who gift him, almost accidentally, with a wide range of skills that will become useful to him in later life

The families that Buster lives with each has something odd about them and each suffers an unexpected tragedy that soon gives Buster a reputation as Jonah or worse.

Buster is guided through his chaotic life by the local sheriff who acts as Buster's guardian angel for reasons that only become clear towards the end of the novel.

The sheriff, like many of the other characters, is a larger than life individual with complex, and sometimes concealed, motives for his actions.

Few people in this book, apart from Buster, are who they at first seem to be. The fates of the characters are as dramatic and as interwoven in surprising ways as those of characters in a Restoration Comedy.

Although many bad things are done by many bad people, some of whom are the same people you thought were good people, I was left with a persistent sense of optimism and hope.

“Improbable Fortunes” is the kind of book that you can only really get by reading it, not be reading about it. Even then, if you're like me, you'll be smiling, scratching your head and saying "I've no idea what just happened but I enjoyed it so much I want ti to happen again”.



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  MikeFinnFiction | May 16, 2020 |
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Winner of the 2016 Laramie Awards for Western Fiction Longlisted for a Reading the West Book Award Finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Best Fiction Finalist for the High Plains Book Awards InImprobable Fortunes, Jeffrey Price takes us on a wild ride into Vanadium, a dusty, down-on-its-heels mining town in southwest Colorado--where it would be fair to assume that nothing has ever happened. But you'd be wrong. As it turns out, quite a lot has happened, starting with a suspicious mudslide that destroys the town's Main Street and a cowboy, Buster McCaffrey, arrested for the death of one of the richest men in America, Marvin Mallomar. As the soon-to-retire Sheriff, Shep Dudival, investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder, it comes to light that Buster and Mallomar's young wife were having a Cowboy Always Rings Twice affair. From there, Price takes this familiar story plot and turns it on its head--folding a rococo cast of Vanadium's characters into a timeline that begins with Vanadium's post-WWII labor strife and ends with the Kulturkampf of present day. While it may all seem humorous and surreal at first blush, one gets the feeling byImprobable Fortunes' unguessable conclusion that Price has used the fictitious town of Vanadium--a place without a recognizable gas station, a decent restaurant, or a clean bathroom--as the Rosetta Stone for something larger.

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