"Back in the Saddle" by Ruth Logan Herne

Colt Stafford returns to the family ranch in central Washington State. What had been a successful, high-flying financial position on Wall Street has run into a career-ending dead end. His firm had gotten victimized, along with countless others, in what looked like a sound investment but had actually been a Ponzi scheme. Colt had been hurt, as had all of his clients.  

In the years since he fell out with his father, things at the ranch have changed. Angelina Morales has become the housekeeper. She’s a former policewoman from Seattle; the ranch is a safe haven for her to hide her mother and young son from vengeful criminals. She was taken in once by a high-flying financial services type, and that’s why she wants to avoid Colt like the plague. 

 

Colt’s father, Sam, the family patriarch, is seriously ill. He’s also become a Christian and is trying to figure out how to make up for a lot of offensive decisions over the years and the time he lost with his three sons, each born of a different mother. The town, and the sons, are not easily impressed. Or convinced.

 

Ruth Logan Herne

Back in the Saddle by Ruth Logan Herne is the first of three novels in the Double S Ranch series, the second being Home on the Range and the third being Peace in the Valley (Herne must like using country western song titles). She tells a good story of broken people finding their way in the world and finding their way back home.

 

Herne has published almost 50 books and novellas, most of them in the Christian romance genre and many of them, like Back in the Saddle, as part of a series. She has more than a million books in print.

 

The tension mounts as Colt and Angelina discover a powerful attraction for each other. Each thinks the other will return to their career loves as soon as the opportunity presents itself, and it does, for both of them. Back in the Saddle becomes a story of people learning how to trust, and to love, again.

 

 

Related:

 

Home on the Range by Ruth Logan Herne.

Reading the 1913 Edition of “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare”

It was an intriguing invitation. Read all the works of William Shakespeare in a year?  

Poet Dave Malone posed the challenge. Writer Callie Feyen accepted. I wavered, trying to balance time commitments, and then I leaped. But before I told Malone yes, I checked to make sure my memory was correct, and I indeed had a one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. I did. I also had several copies of several individual plays, small, hardbound editions published between 1890 and 1930.

 

Also pushing my decision was having read The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, the movies Shakespeare in Love and Much Ado About Nothing, which I truly enjoyed, and having seen Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones playing the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2013. 

 

My copy of the 1913 edition of Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare has been occupying space on my bookshelves for more than 30 years. Judging by the bookplate, I purchased the book sometime in the late 1980s from Dappled Gray Antiques, a shop in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood that had been across the street from the Kirkwood train station. The antiques are long gone, the owner having retired and moved away. The train station is still there, an Amtrak station operating in a building built in 1893.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: The actor Robert Mantell in the stage production of Richard III, from Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare.

"OOF" by Strobe Witherspoon

If you’ve ever wondered what an “OOF” is, it’s the acronym for “online outrage fiesta.” It’s also the title of a new novel by Strobe Witherspoon, whose main character is – a writer named Strobe Witherspoon. 

Witherspoon has landed a contract for a novel by a fictional former first lady (FLOTUS) who has written a memoir. She is originally from an Eastern European country, emigrated to the United States for her modeling career, eventually brought her parents over, and married a wealthy tycoon-type of businessman who unexpectedly became President of the United States. Not that there’s any similarity to people living or dead, of course.

 

The online world, both haters and supporters of the former president, get wind of the memoir’s existence and the bidding war from publishers. Outrage ensues (you know the kind of outrage – what has dominated Facebook, Twitter, and other social media from 2016 to 2020) The story that unfolds in an exercise in understanding how cancel culture from both ends of the political spectrum operates. 

 

What OOF does, and does remarkably well, is describe that cancel culture in all its permutations, including how mainstream media play their roles is ensuring cancel culture continues and thrives. The author does this through a creative narrative device – using articles, reports, studies, tweets, blog posts, email newsletters, and other kinds of communications. And what he nails is both The New York Times and The New Yorker, among several others, with chapters that sound as if they written by the publications themselves. 

 

What this story shows is just how close society is sailing to individual and mass violence, aided and abetted by our communication-soaked culture.

 

Witherspoon’s first novel was furtl (2014), which was selected as a book of the year by Kirkus Reviews. While Strobe Witherspoon is more than highly likely a pseudonym, the author can be found on Facebook, Medium, and Instagram as @strobewitherspoon and on Twitter as @strobewither.

 

 OOF is a riot of a read, with “riot” meaning both funny and disturbing, occasionally terrifying. It holds up a mirror to our culture and our institutions, and none of them, and none of us, look good in the reflection. 

The one thing

After Philippians 3:12-14

I love history, especially

my history, the history

of me. I love looking

back, to see how far

I’ve come, what 

I’ve achieved, what

obstacles I’ve overcome,

celebrating my journey,

sharing my wisdom.

Except none of it is

true; it only looks true

when given a superficial

glance. By me. Scratch

the façade, and what

lies beneath was

brought to me by him,

only him, the one.

I don’t forget what

lies behind; instead,

understanding what

I know and where

I come from, I strain

forward to what lies

ahead, as if I’m running

a race. What lies

behind is important;

what lies ahead is

vital.

 

Photograph by Eric Muhr via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads - August 14, 2021

The Church of England has been in decline for some time. But some of the most historic buildings in Britain are churches. James Stevens Curl at The Critic Magazine looks at the death of the church building.  

In a related story of church decline, this one from the western side of the Atlantic, Bruce Ashford at Christianity for the Common Good suggests that politics has replaced religion in America. 

 

It is a truism – people don’t read fiction. In Christian circles, people who read fiction are typically women, and they read a very particular kind of fiction. Leland Ryken at Desiring God makes the case for the reading of fiction – by Christians.

 

More Good Reads

 

Faith

 

How Could Jonathan Edwards Own Slaves? Wrestling with the History of a Hero – John Piper at Desiring God.

 

Olympians & the Book of Hebrews: Running with Perseverance – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics.

 

Letter to a Young Mother – James Faris via Gentle Reformation.

 

Poetry

 

Songs of Comfort – Karen An-hwei at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Daylight – Edmund Keeley at The Hudson Review.

 

Found – Kelly Belmonte at All Nine.

 

Denise Bundred: Self-Portrait with Damaged Ear (4 poems on Van Gogh) – David Cooke at The High Window.

 

A Bagatelle for Brokenness – Daniel Kemper at Society of Classical Poets.

 

British Stuff

 

Where Handel & Hendrix Were Neighbors – Spitalfields Life.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Meeting Solzhenitsyn – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

News Media

 

A Media Scholar Explains Why News For The Liberal Elite Is Hurting Us All – Dann Kennedy at WGBH News.

 

Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse – David Rozado et al at Rozado’s Visual Insights.

 

Life and Culture

 

On the Front Stoop – Tim Vanable at Front Porch Republic.

 

Both Sides Now – Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles

Painting: Man Reading a Book, oil on copper by Pieter Cornelisz van Slingelandt (1640-1691). 

Self-made: not

After Philippians 3:12-14

The spotlight is on self;

the self loves the spotlight,

the attention, the flattery

(even if from the self),

the affirmation. Not

to mention control. 

Every good heresy

starts with self and

often ends with self.

I could brag, I suppose,

and say I did it all

my way (sounds like

a song), but the fact is

whatever self was, is

involved, he gets

the credit, because

myself was himself;

he made me his own.

A slow transformation,

to be sure, sometimes

even tortured. Whom

am I kidding? Not

sometimes. Try all

the time; I was

that stubborn.

 

Photograph by Sharon McCutcheon via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Down Among the Dead" by Damien Boyd

The Battle of Sedgemoor (1685) has the distinction of being the last battle ever fought on English soil. James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, had rebelled against his uncle, James II and was aiming to seize the throne. The terrain was boggy, foggy, and crisscrossed by streams and ditches. The battle, such as it was, was joined when a shot was unexpectedly fired, warning the royalist troops. What is called a battle ended in wholesale slaughter. Many of those who survived were transported as slaves to the West Indies. 

The battle has long held the interest of British mystery writer Damien Boyd, who uses the battle and its possible modern repercussions in the tenth D.I. Nick Dixon story, Down Among the Dead. Boyd writes great mysteries, and this one has his trademarks of a gripping, engaging narrative and a thrilling climax.

 

Fifteen years previously, Daniel Parker was convicted of being the serial killer known as The Scytheman. Several people, mostly young men, had disappeared, but a mother and her teenaged daughter were the victims whose murders resulted in Parker’s apprehension and conviction. D.I. Dixon’s chief was the young arresting officer, but he was never convinced that Parker was the real killer. Yet the killings had stopped after Parker’s apprehension. All of the killings were in the lands adjacent to the old Sedgemoor battleground. 

 

Damien Boyd

Parker is making an appeal for a retrial, his lawyer submitting new evidence that wasn’t available at the time. It’s unlikely, though, that the high court will allow a new trial. That is, until D.I. Dixon, put in charge of looking at all the evidence, discovers that Parker may indeed be innocent. And then a body of one of the missing teens is found by an archaeological crew. The problem is that the post-mortem shows the body had been buried at most nine months before. Parker couldn’t have done it, since he was in prison.

 

The Scytheman still walks. And soon there’s another murder.

 

Boyd uses his own experience as a legal solicitor and a member of the Crown Prosecution Service to frame his stories, and then infuses considerable research in just the right way. In the novels, Dixon had been a promising young barrister, until he chucked it all and joined the police. As it is, he’s one of the youngest detective inspectors in the Avon and Somerset police force; he’s also the most brilliant at solving cases which look unsolvable. Like this one.

 

Down Among the Dead is an excellent police procedural with an added bonus – telling the story of the Battle of Sedgemoor.

 

Related:

My review of Damien Boyd’s As the Crow Flies.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Head in the Sand.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Kickback.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Swansong.

My review of Damien Boyd's Dead Level.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Death Sentence.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Heads or Tails.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Dead Lock.

 

My review of Damien Boyd’s Beyond the Point.