Gabriels Story: A Novel

Gabriel's Story has ratings and 28 reviews. book had my attention right away for telling a coming of age story in the West through the lens of a young black.
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While his mother and brother accept the reduced circumstances of their new life, Gabriel looks upon the primitive one-room sod house, the meager crops, and the endless fields of grass with loathing. Filled with memories of his deceased father and the dreams they shared, Gabriel decides to run away and become a cowboy. However, his search for excitement brings trouble and danger as he encounters a host of unsavory characters while testing himself against this brutally unforgiving new landscape. In a novel in which place itself is a character, David Anthony Curham re-creates the harshness of life on the plains and the desperate struggles of a family trying to eke out a meager existence while building a future for itself against seemingly insurmountable odds.

His portrait of Gabriel masterfully captures a coming-of-age under extreme circumstances and presents a rare look at the role black cowboys played in settling the West. Durham is an astonishingly gifted writer whose work crosses the boundaries of color by dealing in universal truths.

His remarkable book not only opens up the hidden history of the West, where a fourth of all cowboys were black, but triumphs in its language and vision to reveal an exciting new talent. Publishers Weekly Starred Review: The old West, both beautiful and brutal, is the setting of Durham's magnificently realized debut novel, a classic coming-of-age story of an African-American boy.

Shortly after the Civil War, year-old Gabriel Lynch, his mother and younger brother head out from Baltimore to meet Gabriel's new stepfather in Kansas, where the family hopes to make a fresh start as farmers. But Gabriel finds homesteading to be backbreaking and depressing and is soon lured away by cruel, charismatic Marshall Hogg, who's leading a group of cowboys down into Texas. It seems a dream come true for Gabriel, but then the nightmare begins. While bloated with whiskey, Marshall accidentally murders a man, precipitating a flight from the law that degenerates into a grotesque spree of burglary, rape, kidnapping and murder.

Gabriel desperately wants to escape, but is prevented by Marshall's threats and the menacing presence of Caleb, a mute and shadowy figure. When Gabriel finally manages to free himself, the evil that he unwillingly witnessed follows him back home--and threatens the people he loves most.

Gabriel's Story: A Novel - David Anthony Durham - Google Книги

Durham is a born storyteller: Equally impressive is Durham's gift for describing the awful beauty of the American West: Copyright Cahners Business Information. Kirkus Review Starred Review: Intensely dramatic debut, set in Kansas and points west and southwest during the s: The protagonist, teenaged Gabriel Lynch, arrives from the East with his widowed mother Eliza and younger brother Ben at a train station where they're met by her husband-to-be, Solomon Johns, a farmer who had been Eliza's first love before her life with the boys' father, a prosperous middle-class Baltimore mortician.

Gabriel resents the opportunities lost, and the hard life they're introduced to, and eagerly leaves "home," joining another black boy James to ride with a group of cattle drovers. A bloodthirsty odyssey ensues, as the gang's embittered leader Marshall Hogg an amoral fatalist straight out of Dostoevsky directs his minions to steal, rape, and murder, ever moving on, through Mexico, Arizona, and the Rockies, en route to California, away from the avengers who slowly, methodically pursue them.

Durham tells this story with great skill, weaving together a beautifully plotted central action and extended italicized passages detailing the embattled growth to manhood of the stoical Ben and the steely determination of a bereaved Mexican soldier who'll follow Hogg to hell and back. Meanwhile, he also depicts with hallucinatory vividness the enigmatic figure of Hogg's second-in-command Caleb, a black drover who never speaks, and harbors a terrible secret indeed Gabriel's Story grates on the reader's nerves unerringly, and frequently rises to real grandeur.

A brilliant example of how to assimilate and transmute powerful literary influence. And what a movie this dark, haunting tale will make. Gabriel is angry with his lot in life, particularly with his mother, who has taken him from his home in the East and his dream of becoming a doctor to a homestead on the plains and a stepfather, Solomon, whom he has barely met.

Soon Gabriel befriends another dissatisfied youth, James, and the two innocent African American boys run away from their troubles in search of adventure with a band of cowboys. The road they've chosen becomes a perilous one, taking them across the American West with men prone to violence and pursued by their own demons. On this journey from home and back, one could conclude that Gabriel discovers what he values, but one also sees the enactment of that old saying about the grass being greener on the other side. And the surfeit of symbolism for example, picture Eliza crossing troubled waters will have critics salivating.

Nevertheless, the circular movement of the plot is devastatingly powerful, particularly the embedded coming-of-age story involving the leader of the cowboys, Marshall Hogg, and his chief companion, the black Caleb. Read more Read less. Add all three to Cart Add all three to List. Buy the selected items together This item: Ships from and sold by Amazon. So Far from God: Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.

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From The New Yorker In this moving first novel, set in the eighteen-seventies, Gabriel, a fifteen-year-old black boy from Baltimore, resents his new life on the Kansas plains when his widowed mother marries a homesteader. Anchor; Reprint edition April 30, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. The Lead Miner's Daughter.

Gabriel's Story

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Gabriel’s Story

Meet him and his motley crew today. You'll feel like you're in Ireland. Meet the she-wolf, Elizabeth Tudor's hated cousin, Lettice. Of the same blood, they had the same loves.

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Two strong women destined to be enemies. Sometimes the world needs a bad man. An outlaw Viking battles an eastern demon with the fate of thousands hanging in the balance. Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers.

Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention coming of age gabriel story main character david anthony anthony durham gabriel lynch age story great book kansas west mother western james brother evil group journey violence youth baltimore. Both Hiram and Ben shoot at it and think they have killed it only to find the animal vanished, as if into thin air. At the novel's climax, when Caleb and Marshall are threatening the family, Ben discovers the wolf's remains, which he regards as a providential sign [p. How does Ben interpret this "sign"?

What does the wolf symbolize in the novel? When Gabriel comes upon a dead deer entangled in the branches of a tree, he observes that it "seemed somehow Biblical, some amalgamation of a burning bush and a living crucifix. Once more this journey had given him an image he'd carry ever after" [p. Why is this image so potent for Gabriel? What other images sear his consciousness on his journey? What effect do these images have on him?

In the novel's climactic scene, as Gabriel is about to open the box in which he'd buried the gold brick, Marshall tells him that if God produces and places a second gold brick in the box, Marshall will spare them. Let's put it to the test" [p. But when Gabriel puts his hand in the box he finds a pistol instead.


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Is this an act of divine intervention, a reward for the family's faith? How does Gabriel's Story address the grand universal themes of good and evil, human vengeance and divine retribution, the outcast and the community? Why does Caleb shoot Marshall instead of Solomon and Eliza as he's been ordered to do? Which aspects of Caleb and Marshall's tangled history would make him act in this way? Gabriel's Story takes place at a crucial moment in American history, just after the Civil War when freed slaves were moving north and trying to make new lives as landowners, when Native Americans were being swept from the country, and when the frontier was being fully opened to the West.

How does the novel portray the changing relations between whites, blacks, and Native Americans during this period? Much of Gabriel's Story revolves around family--the effects of abuse on Marshall and Caleb's family, their destruction of the "little Eden" of the Mexican family they encounter, and the trials and ultimate triumph of Gabriel's family. What does the novel as a whole seem to be saying about the importance of family?

What qualities make Gabriel's Story unique in the Western genre? In what ways is the West, as is it portrayed in the novel, different from the myths that have been passed down through film and popular fiction? In what ways can recent American history--especially in terms of race, gender, and family issues--be seen in embryo in Gabriel's Story? Enter for the chance to win a call from an author Group Talk: One Book, One Community Community-based reading initiatives are a growing trend across the country, and we're pleased to support these programs with a wide range of resources.

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