TO THE BONE

A stormy extended-family saga set in the Arizona Territory in 1911 from Fackler.

Book 1 of the novel opens with a classic trope: an heir inherits a massive estate from a deceased family member and the rest of the family gets jealous. Here, the Strummar property in Tejoe, Arizona, has been bequeathed to Sky Strummar, 11, by his late father, Seth Strummar. His sister Elena is bitterly suspicious and resentful. All the siblings (and half-siblings) live in the long, almost mythic, shadow of their late father, who spent years in prison, returned to Tejoe a reformed man, and then quit the kids, slipping off to California. (To be a Strummar means unresolved longing, guilt, and resentment.) Just when Sky is beginning to convince them—especially Elena—that he does not intend to pursue his claim to his father’s estate, he is the target of a botched kidnapping and robbery masterminded by his half-brother, Lobo Madera, who then hits the trail and turns up at his stepfather’s ranch in Colorado for a new beginning in Book 2. Lobo is, in a way, the most interesting of Seth’s progeny: He’s always looking for trouble, but his schemes, like the kidnapping of Sky, are usually doomed. He struggles being the son of a local legend. Can he break the hold that Daddy’s ghost has on him? The author is a very prolific writer: there are six books in the Seth Strummar series alone. She tells a good story, keeps things moving and dishes up surprises aplenty. Book 2 is good at showing Lobo’s Oedipal struggles, but a list of characters and connections would be immensely helpful: the welter of siblings, half-siblings, stepchildren, and so on, is awfully hard to keep straight. And though Fackler works hard to show Sky as preternaturally wise and poised, the reader still can’t forget the fact that he is only a tween. What’s more, the author has a prickly tendency toward stilted prose, as when Elena contemplates her jewelry as “offering a tawdry discordance to her otherwise harmonious presentation.”

Despite its flaws, this book offers psychological complexity not usually found in run-of-the-mill Westerns.