Give me books, fruit, french wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors. --John Keats

Sunday, September 24, 2017

"Retribution Road" by Antonin Varenne

Ugh, I did not want to read this book. It looks so horribly boring! Yep, I'm a cover-judger. And I'm totally not into Westerns. (Books or movies... Hate me now? I don't care. Or, can we call a truce if I admit I really enjoyed Lonesome Dove?)

Anyway . . . Whoever designed this cover shouldn't quit their day job. Unless their day job is designing book covers. I never would have picked this book up if it hadn't been for Sam's insistence that the inferior cover didn't match the novel itself. And Sam is usually right about books.

So I read it. And Sam was right, of course. I wonder how many other readers were put off by that cover? Maybe more will be drawn in by the next one, as shown on the Quercus website:




This book covers a lot of ground. Originally written in French and published under a title that translates to "Three Thousand Horsepower," it begins in 1852 with Sergeant Arthur Bowman of the East India Company, who is selected for a secret mission in Burma that doesn't end well. Six years later, back in London, he finds himself tracking down the other men from that mission, which eventually leads him to the American West (hence that awful book cover, which made more sense once I got to that part of the story, but that didn't make me like it).