BOOK REVIEW: "Wolves at the Door"

Wolves at the Door

By Thomas A. Chown

Copyright 2007

Pipers Willow, Inc.

Adult Fiction

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Man, am I getting tired of these low scoring reviews.  I'm ready to read a five again, I tell ya. 

Shockingly, I have (once again) started a book that I DID NOT FINISH.  I simply couldn't. 

This book was supposed to be a historical novel about a family who settles in Kansas and Colorado during the 1800s. 

The book starts out with Henry Devon fighting in a battle of the Civil War.  It cuts to snippets of his life with his family who came out west to take advantage of Uncle Sam's kind offer of free land in Kansas, but the author spent plenty of time recounting numerous gruesome things that, I'm sure, actually occurred (although it really is my preference NOT to read about them).  After those first gory pages, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep reading, but of course I did. 

So the story progresses with Henry and his family doing what they need to survive there in the wilderness of Kansas.  When the author then moved on to Henry and his wife recalling the death of their first child, I got a little knot in my stomach.  I don't do well with dead kids.  Just one of those things.  And again, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep reading, but of course I did.

So there I am then, on page 40 (yes, a mere 40 pages into this disasterous book), when the family ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and their youngest son has his spinal cord severed.  Really?  I don't do well with dead kids and I don't do well with gonna-be-dead-soon kids.  I closed the book and didn't open it again.

Really, that wasn't the only reason I put down the book.  I had a serious problem with the headers in the book.  The publisher actually used the same font (and text size) for the headers as they did for the body of the book (why would somebody do that?)  A little OCD maybe?  Yes.  But every time I turned the page, I read "Bleeding Kansas" at the top of the page before my eyes would go back down to the text where they belonged and finish the sentence I had been reading.  I found it highly, highly annoying. 

So yeah.  Unless you like the roughest side of the Old West, and dead kids, don't read this one.