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Custer's Brother's Horse by Edwin Shrake
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Edwin Shrake Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2007-10-15 ISBN: 0971766789 Number of pages: 264 Publisher: John M. Hardy Publishing Company
Book Reviews of Custer's Brother's HorseBook Review: A Terrific Novel! Summary: 5 Stars
What a terrific novel! This type of entertaining story-telling just doesn't come along very often. Put it among the best-written historical novels of Texas, with THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY and LONESOME DOVE, and with great recent post-Civil War novels, ENEMY WOMEN and COLD MOUNTAIN.
There are dead-on descriptions of Texas geography, from Austin to East Texas bayous, and natural history abounds -- a special attention to birds, birds, but the whole of the story hidden frequently in mist, fog, rain, smoke that gives it at times almost a fairytale atmosphere ... punctuated by gunfire and brutality. Shrake especially excels at carefully including the backgrounds of each of his major characters, and an opportunity for the action to be seen from each of their points of view, so that there is a deep enrichment of interest in them, in the fate of each.
This is accurate history, a carefully drawn story with ambiguous moral high grounds, a family feud, love interests, the uncertain life of freed slaves, great adventure and the influence of a magnificent horse. Truly creative, the unexpected at every turn, and an ending that deserves applause. A fine work. Thank you, Bud Shrake.
Summary of Custer's Brother's HorseA young Confederate captain with a grisly past as a cavalry raider in Tennessee is on his way home to his family plantation north of Houston in the last days of the Civil War. In Austin, Capt. Jerod Robin is accused of murder and is thrown into the stockade by U.S. Army Capt. Santana Leatherwood, a Texan whose family has feuded bitterly for decades with the Robin family. In the stockade Robin meets British novelist and adventurer Edmund Varney, in Austin to write the life story of Lt. Tom Custer, heroic younger brother of famous General George Armstrong Custer. Varney is charged with attempting to steal Tom Custer's legendary warhorse, Athena, upon whose back Custer recently won two Congressional Medals of Honor. The two prisoners stand trial beside a 16-year-old mulatto girl, Flora Bowprie, who has come from New Orleans searching for her father but has been arrested as a runaway slave. Homicidal events cause the rebel captain, the British author and the young fortuneteller to flee from a Cavalry squad led by Santana Leatherwood and Tom Custer, mounted on his great Arabian horse. The story races to the inevitable showdown between the Robins and Leatherwoods, two families on opposite sides in the Civil War. But, before the final confrontation Jerod Robin hears a dark accusation about his birth and his mother that lends a special ferocity to the showdown. Then the story of "Custer's Brother's Horse" takes a surprising twist. This is a horse for the ages.
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