Enlarge Cover
list price: $11.99
category: Fiction
published: Mar 2020
ISBN:9781773101316
publisher:
Goose Lane Editions
list price: $11.99
category: Fiction
published: Mar 2020
ISBN:9781773101316
publisher:
Goose Lane Editions
Description
Featured in The Globe and Mail's Winter books preview: 36 reads to get you through till spring
On 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated: Spring 2020 Fiction Preview List
On CBC Books' spring reading list: 40 great books to read this season
Francis Blackstone is a fourteen-year-old gunslinger with a heart of gold.
He’s fallen for the mayor’s daughter and resolves to make his mark, and his fortune, to win her favour. And what better way than to rob a Manhattan Company bank? Enter Bob Temple, the volatile outlaw who takes Francis under his wing— though not without a degree of suspicion— and so begins the adventures of the Blackstone Temple Gang as they crisscross the west in search of treasure, redemption, and the possibility of requited love.
After an encounter with a rival gang, Francis and Bob Temple are chased over the Sierras to California, where they enjoy unexpected fame as gentleman bandits. But their newfound celebrity brings hardships as well, and when their final job takes a startling turn, Francis is forced to discover what it means to make peace with a world that stands against him.
At once a tribute to boyhood enthusiasm and the heroes of classical quests, Like Rum-Drunk Angels is an offbeat, slightly magical, entirely original retelling of Aladdin as an American western.
Editorial Reviews
"Like Rum-Drunk Angels is beautifully cinematic, with surprising story breaks that create a long-lasting controlled suspense."
— <i>Hamilton Review of Books</i>
"A surreal, often hilarious fracturing of traditional western tropes, imbuing classic elements with a spirited post-modern awareness. ... Like Rum-Drunk Angels is a hoot, with a tender heart at its core."
— <i>Quill and Quire</i>
"Tyler Enfield opens a treasure chest of familiar Western tropes, turns them upside down and inside out, and makes them dance. Funny, absurd, wildly inventive, and then — just as you’re least prepared for it — deeply moving. Magic."
— Ian Weir
"Like Rum-Drunk Angels wrings a variation on the American Western which is entirely unique — saucy, funny, warm, tender, unbridled. It’s a breakneck gallop of a book, as fine a novel as I have read in a long time."
— Wayne Johnston
As good a western as any of the 21st century
I don't wish to overload this review with superlatives, so I'll be blunt; Like Rum-Drunk Angels is one fine-aged whiskey of a western. Rife with allusions as varied as One Thousand and One Nights, The Iliad, and a host of others I'm barely able to keep up with, Tyler Enfield's novel is gritty, urbane, surreal, and often hysterically funny.
If Charles Portis and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. were to team up on a project (which then went on to Patrick deWitt for notes and Richard Brautigan for a final once-over), I think Enfield's wonderful tome would be the outcome.