My current gig is Children's Librarian at a small town public library. As such I am responsible for the young adult section and also a witness to the circulation of adult novels, most popularly romances and mysteries or spy novels.
Many current novels are intended to be mirrors of experience for today’s youth, set in urban settings with upsetting plots, and the children are often caretakers of the adults. Even the ones which include fantasy and escapism work in family or neighborhood evils. Of course it is important to reflect all of our youth in the stories available to them. However I sometimes long to share the experience of books I loved as a child, where the de rigueur death or absence of the parents was merely the device by which the children acquired the independence to conduct their own adventures. The hard times were the context for the development of character through action, and not the definition of the character.
I think it may be time for the return of the Western. You know all those cowboy movies which seemed like they might be boring, grizzled men and cinched women in black and white TV reruns when we were kids? Well maybe you haven’t read the novels. Finding myself working side by side with young Republicans years ago, I was referred by fans to the books of Louis L’Amour. I joke that every Libertarian needs one to carry around. They are easy, compelling reads, transport one to the wide open, (though, being picaresque stories, the scenery and geography changes). Something called the Official Louis L’Amour Website http://www.louislamour.com/ refers to Adventure in the Great American Tradition, and displays this quotation:
"One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!" . . . Louis L'Amour”
The same could be said about the reading experience of course.
Richard Vadim’s Hot Shot is a fast, compelling Western read. The hot shot is a girl who calls herself Sam, and her story opens with her having to run from home to escape her father. As one of the Harvey Weinstein accusers explained of her own experience, Sam chooses not to define herself as a victim based on the perpetrator’s actions. Sam has surely been affected, in her discomfort with display of her adolescent womanhood, but we don’t share internal deliberation over the incident other than her “anguish” : “Was her mother even aware? She hoped not.” If her mother did know, she was complicit or failed to protect. If her mother truly doesn’t know, she is spared her own guilt and anguish. Sam is on the move, taking action to create her own future, even if there are times she chooses to just drift or doze with her horse for company.
Sam meets a number of trustworthy adults, strong women and men, who aid her in her growing up away from her parents. Sam is respectful in accepting guidance and help from older people, while retaining her own decision making power and choice. She experiences a number of romantic attachments with young men who respond to her pursuit, a boyhood fishing buddy, the young man who provides her access to guns, the stranger who knows how to cure rattlesnake bite; and fends off, with wit and violence, a series of men who pursue her or hers with foul intention. She ultimately makes a life choice which was perhaps shocking for the time.
How and why is it Western? A friend once offered a very reasonable explanation for the red state/blue state division in the U.S.A., when it comes to perspective on government and on guns. In densely populated urban areas we pay for and have more government services. When there’s miles and hours between you and the law, you are left to your own resourcefulness.
To quote Sheriff Longmire in the series based on the mystery novels by Craig Johnson, why didn’t he call 9-1-1 for an ambulance? “I am 9-1-1.”
A quick look at the other “Hot Shot” books for sale out there implies that a hot shot is typically male, with the exception possibly of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s woman in a corporate man’s world. There’s a whole other context around women of the old western frontier. Don’t forget, in this 100th Anniversary year of suffrage, that women’s right to vote started out West, the first state being Wyoming, and only gradually and last reached the East Coast.
Sam explains in Hot Shot, when she looks for coaching and practice in shooting, “Well, seems to me, women are more likely to need guns than men.” And that is the argument which the (grant you, correct minded) gun control interest group too often neglects: guns can be viewed as the equalizer for the defense of one confronted by superior size or might--especially for one with the talents of a quick draw, sharp eye and steady hand, and preference for peace.
Being that this novel is a Western, disclosure: there are confrontations and plot involving the original American Peoples, which are well researched and as tactful as possible with due regard to the period setting, nevertheless, one anticipates controversy over the inclusion of indigenous characters by a white writer.
There are also horses, gun fights, the wide open horizon, and medicine. As usual with a Vadim work the best storytelling is in the writer’s nailing of the dialect and conversations of the people, the old doc, the frontier marm, the hotelier, the youthful flirtations and kidding, the soldier, the lawman, the ranchers and the bad guys. Hot Shot is an appropriate, fun and unique coming-of-age story for young adults and will be a fresh taste for those experienced readers who may want a brief change from city and suburban romances and mysteries.
Yes, I do know the author personally. Hot Shot is available here https://amzn.to/38Aj00k
