Reviews for Riders of the Purple Sage

The average rating for Riders of the Purple Sage based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-04 00:00:00 Mark Ayles I've been bamboozled! Duped! Hoodwinked! Fraudulated! Deceived! I've fallen victim to tomfoolery! Shenanigans! Monkeyshines! Nefarious antics! (What's that? Yes, I do own a thesaurus. Why do you ask?) This tricky man Zane Grey fooled me into reading a book of the genre I swore I never would read: the official genre of grocery stores and bargain racks everywhere, capital-R Romance. It all began innocently enough. For one thing, this Riders of the Purple Sage is published by Modern Library. It has been heralded as a foundation of the Western genre. Its opening pages depict a woman being harassed by her Mormon patriarchs for cavorting with Gentiles. Things look like they could get messy. Then on the crest of a hill, silhouetted against the setting sun, appears the image of a man and his horse (always disturbing for the bad guys and hopeful for the good guys.) This is Lassiter, a gunslinger of the highest order, and he's here to chew gum and shoot bad guys in the buttocks! And he's nearly out of gum! He's only got like two sticks of Juicy Fruit left. This is not only a great start to a Western. It is the start to a Western. But what does Lassiter do? Does he shoot bad guys in the buttocks? No. Does he shoot them in the head? No. Does he shoot them in the penis? No. For a gunslinger, there is a distinct lack of shooting people in Lassiter's life. What Lassiter does instead is fall in love. And so does everyone else in the book. That would be okay if Zane Grey did it in one of two ways. 1) He could throw in some more shooting. Buttocks, heads, penises, whatever. Just give me some shooting. 2) Or he could write really great prose that makes me have feelings for his characters and tricks me into thinking they are real people. Instead, Grey gives the reader scenes like this: "No more did he listen to the rush and roar of the thunderstorm. For with the touch of clinging hands and the throbbing bosom he grew conscious of an inward storm'the tingling of new chords of thought, strange music of unheard, joyous bells, sad dreams dawning to wakeful delight, dissolving doubt, resurging hope, force, fire and freedom, unutterable sweetness of desire. A storm in his breast'a storm of real love." That's the way characters in this book fall in love. There are plenty of heaving bosoms, but no real emotions. Thus, I propose a makeover for this book. Following are a couple proposed cover designs. If those covers look good to you, you will like this book. Also, there is something wrong with you.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-19 00:00:00 Jeffrey Dover Summary: Sage sage sage sage, sage sage Mormon sage. Purple sage sage sage and Gentiles, sage sage sage sage and sage. Sage! Sage sage sage sage riders sage sage. Sage sage if sage sage thunder. Sage sage sage; sage sage sage sage. Mormons sage sage sage sage, sage sage shot, sage sage sage sage. And sage sage. There were some other words and stuff, but really this book is about sage. Mormons, Gentiles, and some other things are mentioned, but the focus is on the sage. The color of the sage, the things in the sage, the way the sage looks, the way the sage feels, the sage the sage the sage. I took to counting the amounts of times the word 'sage' was used - 237 . This isn't a big book. Do the math. That's a lot of freaking uses of the word 'sage'. Sometimes Grey would get clever and hyphenate words: sage-slope, sage-bordered, sage-riders, sage-brush... but that doesn't trick me. It still tastes the same, no matter how you cook it. Clearly the words 'plant' and 'shrub' were considered too dull for use in this story. Did you know the sage was purple? It was ALL PURPLE. There was a lot of purple sage. There's no other way to describe such a sight. All of this aside, the story actually isn't so bad. It's hard to muddle through some of the especially purple prose (for lack of a better phrase - like sage, prose can only be purple), but I was surprised that there's an actual story here. An interesting one at that. Wikipedia calls the story "complex" and I can't say I disagree. I don't know Westerns very well. I watched a lot of reruns of The Lone Ranger when I was a kid (and harbored a weird kid-sized crush on Clayton Moore as a result) but that was pretty much it. I don't like John Wayne. Since we weren't allowed to play games as children that might have been remotely violent, the concept of playing Cowboys and Indians was probably out of the picture. As I got older the idea of reading a Western never appealed much to me, and as an adult working in a bookstore I realized that those Longarm books by Tabor Evans are the male equivalent of Harlequin romances read by so many women. (Hello, LONGARM, that's dirty.) And Louis L'Amour? Snooze. My point here is that I have always expected Westerns to be sort of... formulaic. And boring. Lots of guns and dust and prejudiced comments about women and their place in the world. But then once upon a time about nine years ago I took a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh to Memphis to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. And on the way there (or maybe the way back) I looked up from whatever book I was reading at the time (I know it wasn't a Western) to find we were stopped in downtown Zanesville, Ohio. ZANESVILLE. Whut. There wasn't much to Zanesville that I could see and I don't think more than one person actually got on the bus at that point (he might have been the sole person living in Zanesville for all I knew). But here's the thing I decided after that trip and stopping for 5-10 minutes in the town where Zane Grey was born: One day I would read a novel by Zane Grey. Of course the minute I got home I put the thought out of my head because there were prettier, shinier books that should be read. Then a couple years ago I found this book in the clearance section and realized I had no more excuses. It had to be read. So I bought it. And then promptly forgot about it. Because that's how I roll. What matters is that I read it now, I made good on my promise to Zane Grey and the entire town of Zanesville (population 25K+). I always sort of thought this was his first novel, but it turns out he wrote at least nine books before this one - that this one happens to be his best-known. Despite everything above, I honestly did not hate this book. It was actually a little exciting in parts (in the same way I found The Lone Ranger exciting as a kid watching it on TV), but I was so horribly distracted by the amount of repetition included. I assume this is because Grey himself wasn't actually a writer to begin with - according to my copy's introduction, he was a dentist first, only beginning to write at the prompting of his wife. I am interested to see how his writing in some of his other books stack up. This particular book ended so suddenly (another annoyance) that I probably need to at least read the sequel, The Rainbow Trail. I'm not a huge fan of cliff-hangers and this book has one. And I'm dying to know if The Rainbow Trail has as much freaking sage, or if Grey moves on to new words. Like 'trail'.