Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson
This has to be my most anticipated book of this millennium. The Outlander was always going to be hard act to follow as it was one of my top reads almost 10 years ago. To find the authors latest book is a followup to her first was a real thrill, then I was gutted to learn that her wonderful protagonist Mary is absent from this book, apart from being a memory who comes to her sons mind at times of need.
At first I thought The Ridgerunner wasn’t going to engage with me quite so much. It has a somewhat more masculine feel with mainly male lead characters apart from the Nun who actually turned out to be one of the most complex characters in the book after a slow burn beginning.
But young Jack is such a likeable and well drawn boy I soon fell in love with him and wanted to step through the pages and Mother him.
The Ridgerunner is a Western, it is a follow up to the Outlander which if you haven’t read it I urge you strongly to read before reading this.
The story of a Father and Son and a few great secondary characters who played their parts admirably. Admittedly father is a total recidivist, robbing and thieving and blowing things up with his skewed sense of duty to his son. Parted whilst he sets off to steal enough money to assure his sons future, he leaves the lonely 12 year old lad with a Nun, who loves young Jack obsessively yet fails to provide one touch of affection, no wonder he runs away. The story centres around him surviving alone helped by a friend or two. At first his most loyal friends are a horse with no name and an, also nameless, dog.
He is also helped by two men who become pivotal characters, I’ll let you meet them when you read it, they are also superbly written.
The Authors writing style is wonderful, lyrical and imaginative and shines through the entire story.
I absolutely loved every word and it proved the perfect lockdown read, taking me to another time and country. It warmed my heart and gave me a sense of kinship as the boy survives alone, whilst missing his Mum who died and his Father who seems to have completely abandoned him.
In some parts it is pretty violent and shocking, but this adds to the reckless and lawless existence of the Ridgerunner.
The Blurb
November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.
Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.
Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.
