alisoninbookland
Written on Mar 9, 2018
See more reviews and bookish fun here.
When her father is killed by the notorious Rose Riders for a mysterious journal that reveals the secret location of a gold mine, eighteen year-old Kate Thompson d9Yisguises herself as a boy and takes to the gritty plains looking for answers--and justice.
- ISBN10 0544466381
- ISBN13 9780544466388
- Publish Date 1 September 2015
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 May 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Houghton Mifflin
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 336
- Language English
Reviews
See more reviews and bookish fun here.
limabean74
Written on Nov 28, 2016
I was so excited to read this book, I loved the map inside and the cover got me excited. Overall I enjoyed this book. It gave you a realistic view of the west, no sugar coating in this book, however as it got closer to the end, I felt the it started to get a bit sugar coated and the rawness that I enjoyed it the beginning seemed to loose it's steam.
Kate was a great MC, I loved how determined she was to avenge her father but I also felt that she was holding back a lot. Jesse and Will were great characters however, I was having a hard time getting them to mesh together. Like, I felt the character build was missing something. I am not sure what was missing but I didn't connect with them as much as I wanted. I did enjoy them and the story was pretty good. It took a slow pace but as it got closer to the end I started to enjoy it a lot more. I sort of was disappointed with the romance, I sort of wanted it more in the background, I like how the story was going but felt that a little romance would have been fine but somewhere in the middle it sort of switched directions.
Vengeance Road wasn't a bad book, I actually enjoyed it but it sort of fell flat for me. I think I was looking for a lot more grit and vengeance but I didn't feel like I got that. I wanted less romance and more old west. If you like romance and gritty westerns you will LOVE this book. :)
Thanks for stopping by to check out my review.
Have a great day and Happy Reading!
This review was originally posted on Because reading is better than real life
readingwithwrin
Written on Apr 22, 2016
See reviews first on my blog
When Kate’s father is killed by a group of men she decides to go and avenge his death, and learn why they killed him, and why it looks like they didn’t take anything before they destroyed the house.
Before she can go ride after the killers, though she has to keep a promise she’s made to her father since she was little, that if anything ever happened to him she would go and find Abe.
But when she gets to Abe’s house she learns that he is no longer there, instead his children are including two sons. Who decide to tag along with her until she reaches a certain destination where they say they’ll separate.
Except that doesn’t happen, instead the boys help Kate along the way including almost getting themselves killed multiple times. Kate also eventually gets a guide after she helps a Indian girl working in the saloon escape. But this ends up getting rather complicated thanks to the boys, being rude and prejudice of her.
I really liked this book. It does contain curse words though so if you don’t like that then I don’t think you’ll like this book. I loved the interaction between Kate and the other people in her group. While she was stand-offish it was for good reasons, and when she did start opening up and talking you could tell that that meant she really trusted them and liked them as well. I was not expecting that about her parents. At times I did wonder what exactly happened to her mom, but after a while I just thought it was me being suspicious for no reason.
This was exactly what I was looking for in a YA western though and I really hope more like it come out.
While I am glad Kate and Jesse ended up together, I would have also been completely okay if that hadn’t. Yes they had been through a lot together, but I also felt like maybe they weren’t the best for each other at times. Did anyone else feel that way or is it just me?
nannah
Written on Apr 6, 2016
Book content warnings:
ableist language
racism (in particular, anti-indigenous racism)
fatphobia (one part)
This book was a mess, I'm sorry. The plot is annoyingly simple and I was never able to become as interested in it as any of the characters were, which left me distanced from it. The writing also . . . is a mess.
What this book is trying to sell you is the story of Kate Thompson and her quest for revenge. Her father has been killed by the famous Rose Riders, and she'll do anything - literally anything - to chase them down and return the favor.
Now I understand this is supposed to be a fun Western, but the dialogue and prose (because the two are inseparable as far as the style go) are so full of cliches it's somewhat hard to read:
"You know who did it?" Jesse asks
"Yep. A gang goes by the Rose Riders."
"That's Waylan Rose and his boys! You can't be serious, Nate."
"More serious than a rattler shaking."
It might have to do with the fact that the writing relies on the dialect far to much. Without it, you realize how poor the writing actually is. I mean, dialect can be a great asset, but it has to be used like one or else it's really transparent how much of a gimmick it is.
The dialect is actually written out in misspelled words (like "yer" and "'cus", which doesn't make sense either, being that Kate can read well. Unlike Patrick Ness's The Knife of Letting Go, where the voice reveals something about the protagonist, who couldn't read and was largely uneducated and ignorant about a lot of things plotwise, this "voice" is here just to add glitter and pizazz to lackluster writing. (Besides, there's also inconsistency with the voice. Liluye doesn't have this particular dialect, but then--sometimes, she does. Only a few words, and probably then, an accident.)
But what's definitely not an accident . . . is the very deliberate racism and fatphobia. I can't believe there are books being published in 2015 that still have this much ick in them. Let me give you an example:
". . . two wide men and a lady wider than the both of 'em put together. [. . .] Josie hops from the piano and hits the floor boards with a thunder. By the time she saunters up to me, I's decided that she could kill me by sitting on me."
And that's just by page 23. There's so much more nastiness hiding inside this book. I gave this author a chance, and she spat on me.
The racism. The anti-Indigenous racism in particular. It's so bad. I can imagine the author writing this with good intent and that's when I just want to shake my head in second-hand embarrassment. Now, the MC is biracial, with a Mexican mother and a white father. That's pretty cool, except that the mother turns out to be the Biggest Bad of all, and Kate has thoughts about Not Wanting to Be Like Her and wanting to be like her father only, and with the number of poc being slim here, this really isn't good.
The tone throughout the book is very anti-Indigenous in general. Sure, there's the time period to consider, but one has to recognize your readers and their market today. If you are an author, and you're writing for YA readers, it's your responsibility as an author to write things that are responsible for children to read. Not just white children, either . . . and they're going to read things like:
"The river that flows upside down. I ain't fond of having to follow it. Indians like the water. Crooks like the water. Trouble likes the water."
Ah yes, to be likened to crooks and trouble. There are also Native American slurs and Native Americans being treated like slaves and like dirt.
But there's a Native American character! Yes, but representation doesn't always equal a better book. Especially if the representation is bad representation.
The way the author tries to combat the racist tone she's established so far is to be colorblind:
"The Apache. Only, she don't look so much like an Apache anymore, but just a scared girl."
Colorblindness isn't actually respecting a person of color. And the MC saving her doesn't mean she's not racist. Especially since Liluye (the Native American character) tells Kate (the MC) her name, and Kate gives her a nickname: Lil. Liluye corrects her, saying that "Lil" isn't her name, but Kate continues to call her Lil and ignores all further corrections. The ONLY time Kate uses her actual name is when Kate needs her help, and then she regrets not knowing how to say her name.
There's also an air of "exoticism" present around Liluye that's incredibly disrespectful to Native Americans. It seems whenever there's an indigenous character in any medium, they're the shaman or something the MCs go to when they need a spell or if there's a curse, etc. etc. etc. Here there's just always a mention about how "magical" Liluye is compared to Kate and the other characters:
"It's like she's everywhere, that girl. In the earth and the sky and the dry Arizona air. I remind myself to never cross her."
As far as everything else goes, the book is readable, the plot fairly straightforward. The plot points are predictable. The climax fell flat for me and was over way too fast. In fact, I think a couple lines from the book can sum up my feelings about the climax and the book as a whole:
"It's over. It happened so fast and I don't know what to do with myself. I feel surprisingly empty."
Me too, Kate. Me too.
Mackenzie
Written on Nov 28, 2015
Full review to come.
abigailjohnson
Written on Aug 27, 2015
I could have loved this book, I really could. I'm a huge fan of TRUE GRIT and stories about pioneers in the wild west. And there is a lot to praise here. There really isn't anything else in YA fiction like VENGEANCE ROAD except maybe the superiorly written NOT A DROP TO DRINK by Mindy McGinnis. I loved the TRUE GRIT premise of a girl seeking to avenge her murdered father, and I'm a sucker for girls pretending to be boys and inadvertently discovering romance. I also enjoyed the way the legend of The Lost Dutchman mine was woven into the story with plenty of historically accurate details. There are, however, a few drawbacks as well.
The dialect came just shy of working for me (it did initially, but ultimately came across more like the Doris Day version of Calamity Jane--just a little too hokey for my taste). I also had some trouble with the more modernized view of sex in the book (not that there is anything close to graphic in the book). It could have been lifted from an current YA book. The first half of the book is also stronger than the second, which gets a little twisty and unnecessarily complicated. And ultimately, I didn't end up buying into this old west world and characters as deeply as I had hoped.
VENGEANCE ROAD is still a fun read and definitely distinct from anything else you're likely to spot in the YA section of a book store. There is plenty of violence and bloodshed in keeping with the dangerous time and place the story is set in, but also more than one modern view that doesn't fit as well.
The author has stated that she is considering the idea of a companion novel, "but it would supplement VENGEANCE ROAD (story with new characters and conflicts) rather than be a direct sequel."
shannonmiz
Written on Aug 12, 2015
I absolutely adored the atmosphere of this book: The history of the old southwest, the ruggedness of both the land and the people, and just the overall hardships that people faced in the late nineteenth century frontier territory. The feeling of authenticity was incredible. From the incorporation of the climate, to the infusion of the slang in the dialogue and narration, it was very clear that the author did her homework for this book.
After Kate's father is killed at their small homestead in the northern part of the Arizona territory, Kate has nothing left to lose and isn't going to accept her father's murder. She knows full well that this journey of revenge could end up with her facing the same fate, but she flat out does not care. Kate was such a badass heroine, but it was authentic. It wasn't just for the sake of convenience, it made sense why Kate would be as tough as she was. She was raised almost exclusively by her father, and lived in a very rough place during a very rough time. This quote pretty much nailed Kate's thoughts:
"So long as they go down, I don't much care if I go with 'em"
Kate, as "Nate", finds the kin of her father's friend, and they insist on traveling with her, and thus begins the crazy adventure. First, you know when gold is involved, things are going to get dicey really fast. Clearly, the guys who killed Kate's dad aren't going to be steeped in morality, so Kate and the boys will encounter a ton of violence along the way. There's action in the fighting, and there's action in just surviving in the southwestern desert. Vengeance Road is anything but dull!
There were other characters that they encounter along the way, some of whom I positively adored, but this was certainly Kate's journey. I liked that while she was tough and rugged, and willing to go to hell and back to avenge her father, she still had a femininity about her. She wasn't some kind of one dimensional caricature, she had many sides to her. She also had a lot of time to figure out who she was and who she wanted to become in her father's absence, and that was quite lovely to watch. I also was completely fascinated by the way groups of people treated each other. For example, Kate had to pretend to be male for anyone to take her seriously, as women were definitely regarded as second-class citizens at that time. Also, the tensions between the Native Americans and the newcomers to the territory were palpable. Overall, the characterization was well done, and I liked that Kate's views were expanded upon by the people she met along the way.
I did have a few minor problems. Well, two, one being more minor than the other:
- Some of the plot points were a bit predictable for me. While the book didn't lack action, I did find myself suspecting a lot of the outcomes before they happened.
- The romance wasn't my favorite. Luckily, it was a very small portion of the book, but I just wasn't feeling a ton of chemistry. Also, it too was predictable for me.
Bottom Line: Vengeance Road pretty much nails the southwest in every conceivable way. If you want a book with an authentic western feel, this is it. If you want one with a tough, no-nonsense heroine, this is absolutely it.
Oh, and make sure you read the author's note. It's really interesting!
**Quote taken from uncorrected proof, subject to change**