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Gabriel’s Story by David Anthony Durham is one of those books that I  saw mentioned somewhere (but for the life of me I can’t figure out where), I immediately put on hold at the library, and when I brought it home, everything else I was reading got put down and it cut in line from my looming TBR pile. It’s not often that a book gets that kind of special treatment.  Fortunately, this book was amazing and the line cutting was totally worth it.

Set in the 1870′s, fifteen year-old Gabriel, his mother and little brother have settled with their new stepfather on a struggling farm in Kansas, where black men aren’t fighting so much against the white folks but rather the land.  Gabriel grows increasingly dissatisfied with his new lot in life and the drudgery of homesteading.  When his orphaned friend James suggests that they get hired on with a group of cowboys headed to Texas, Gabriel abandons his family for the call of adventure.  But what begins as an exciting trek soon turns into much more then the boys bargained for as they come to realize that two of the men are brutal and dangerous.  While Gabriel is trying to leave his past behind him, he faces a future is even worse then he could ever imagine.

The writing in Gabriel’s Story is beautiful.  It made me slow down and savor what I was reading.  And it felt great to slow down.  One such passage:

Gabriel had the feeling that something was slipping away from him.  The earth moved under his feet instead of he over the earth.  He was aware of conversations taking place, but he played no part in them.  He heard Jack express his regrets and say his goodbyes and watched him ride off, slow and quiet but still going.  He heard the snap of Bill’s whip over the oxen and saw them enter the river.  The creatures sank in up to their necks and surged forward in rhythmic thrusts, like aquatic beasts of burden harnessed in a fable from some pre-Biblical time.  Gabriel watched them emerge on the other side and move off.  He saw James’s face before him, troubled almost to tears and filled with questions.  He turned and sought out Marshall and found only the man’s back, some thirty yards away.  He was smoking and talking quietly with Caleb, oblivious of the shift in the earth and as calm as any wayward angel whose work is still blessed by providence.  And still the earth rolled beneath the boy’s feet, like a slowly undulating ocean that did not yet drown him but might at any moment.

The American West was as much a character in this book as anything else.  I love it when the landscape plays such a large part in the story.

The San Juans rose before Gabriel like a great receding barricade conceived by the gods and built of the earth itself.  He knew he would have to learn mountain travel through trial and error.  He could construct an image of what was to come from dimly remembered descriptions, but he felt surer each day that he could complete this journey – if not the whole of it, at least that day’s portion.  He wove his way into the foothills, seeking passage through small gaps in the hillsides, over mounds of wind-scoured sandstone, around tilted slabs of granite.  Each ridge gave way to another and another, each higher than the one before.  He learned to gauge the scale of the peaks only slowly, with his wary progress from base to peak and down again.  He felt minuscule below the mountains, like an ant, a tiny thief crawling over the toes of giants.  Thus he rode or led the horse with hushed respect, as if he feared to wake the mountains, and he listened – at first for signs of other people, but increasingly to the many voices around him.

Gabriel’s Story is a quiet story of one boy’s coming of age in set against a loud backdrop.  I really enjoyed this one although a word of warning:  these cowboys are no saints.  Foul language, murder and rape are very present in the story and served to make me hate these men so much.  Durham did an excellent job portraying just how evil they were and just how intimidated Gabriel was.

So glad I read this one. My short review just doesn’t do this one justice.  Excellent.  Like give it some love excellent.

Gabriel’s Story is  part of my themed reading for the month of February which celebrates Black History Month.  Join me this month as I explore books that celebrate the history of African-Americans.
Links of interest: author Author website, book blogger reviews.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Western (Note: although it features a juvenile character this is not a children’s book)
Publisher: Doubleday. January 16, 2001.
Hardcover, 304 pages. ISBN 0385498144
Gabriel’s Story is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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