Reviews for A Sweet Bait of Money

The average rating for A Sweet Bait of Money based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-08 00:00:00 S Bunch O.K., it is a book about Lucy Watson, a welfare worker who comes from a city and is assigned to an uncivilized community in the middle of a mountainous region of the Southwest. Remember, Grey died in 1934 and the basic description of the book left me uninterested. When, I picked it up, I was fascinated. I am a descendant of Appalachians and related with the uncivilized people with whom she went to live with under the Tonto rim. It was a good glimpse of life in uncivilized America at the beginning of the 20th century. I could not put it down and finished it in one night and part of a day. If you are interested in this time period and life before, I strongly recommend this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-05-16 00:00:00 David Battle Although I've heard of Zane Grey all my life (five-plus decades), I'd never read him -- a bit surprising, given my love of horses, western- and wilderness-based stories, and clean adventure and romance. I guess I'd been put off by the covers or the reputation, and expected manly gunslinger tales. What I got in this book was a woman's coming-of-age story through the cultural conflicts of city vs. country, including much social-class prejudice. Technically, Lucy was too old to qualify as a "coming of age" heroine, though the idea was the same. Her personality and point of view were transformed by living among and working with mountain people. That she ended up falling in love with one arose logically from this experience. Yes, there were horses and some gun slinging, but these too were a natural part of the story and its characters. A big player was the setting -- which, I gather, Grey is known for. He lovingly and realistically describes it without bogging down the story, and it influences the character and fate of everyone who lives within it. Oddly, he never places it solidly on the map; and not once did the word "Tonto" cross the pages even though the rim itself was a dominant part of the setting. I haven't decided yet whether these omissions cheat the reader or are a subtle and classy element of style. Either way, they're the only aspect of the book that distracted me. Although the book was quiet in tone, it was nonetheless a page-turner for me. I read the large-print version, and its jacket blurb hinted at an outcome contrary to what I wanted for the characters. So I read with bated breath, dreading the turnabout hinted at and an unhappy ending. Grey maintained the suspense until very close to the end, then tidily wrapped things up. As a reader who hates tragedy, I appreciated this resolution. Then promptly went to the library and took out another title from the packed Zane Grey shelf.