Customer Reviews

Augusta Locke: A Novel

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Augusta Locke is one of the most compelling characters to emerge from the American West. The unbeautiful daughter of beautiful parents, a girl with a wandering habit who walks into Wyoming, she grows into a woman who reads the mind of the country around her -- the Wind River Range, the Great Divide Basin, the Big Sandy River, land where "the season can swing from heat to snow and back in the turn of a day." In Henderson's flat-out gorgeous prose, Gussie's life feels epic, not because the events that make it up are so big, but because we follow her so closely, watching her seasons change. She's a self-made orphan, a fierce mother, a lonely lover, a rough road worker, a woman in a man's world, sometimes a woman in a man's clothing. In the vast plains, such a small female figure might go unnoticed, her life leaving a shallow track like the roads "so barely scratched into the surface that a shift in the angle of the sun would erase them altogether," but Augusta Locke will live with you long after you finish the book and try to put her back on the shelf.

Augusta "Gussie" Locke is one of the most facinating and fully drawn female literary characters in recent memory. Her defiant, independent spirit is both inspiring and deeply moving. Henderson paints vivid and palpable landscapes of the West with some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read about the region. This book is not just for Westerners - although, I suspect that Westerners will particularly appreciate it. The book's great humanity, and staggering portrayal of the natural world, make it a must-read for everyone. I could not more highly recommend Augusta Locke.

Augusta Locke is as wild as the landscape she inhabits. Unable to sit still when her mother marries a man who'd like to tame her wandering ways, she escapes into the wild west. She lives as the men around her live, by ranching and working for the oil crews. Yet, in the midst of this rough life, she remains very much a woman. A one night stand early in her journey leaves her pregnant and she gives birth to a daughter who is destined to leave her, as well. Henderson's descriptions of the landscape, the hardscrabble existence and the people Augusta encounters on her journey, are among the most beautiful being penned today. The land itself becomes a character worth knowing in this beautifully wrought novel. Well worth the read.

Augusta Locke is one of those rare books that takes you to a new place and time and allows you to walk around in it. And what a relief to read of a character you've never met before. Gussie is not your everyday scrappy cross-dressing survivor; she's at times heroic, cowardly, selfish and selfless. She's a winning loser; an uncannily self-directed woman who also, at times, is completely lost. To embrace these contradictions is the mark of a writer. To make the reader believe them is the work of an artist.

This is a fictional chronicle of six generations of a western family. The west is always one of my favorite subjects. Gussie is a rare woman, both strong and tender. She is a character you will never forget. This raw and haunting tale is my pick for best book for the first half of 2006.

A touching story centered on a truly genuine character, Gussie (Agusta) Locke, a woman as much a part of Wyoming as the wind. William Haywood Henderson's lush descriptions, his poetic excursions into Gussie's imagination are unforgettable. Worth reading again and again to savor not only the author's eye for detail but the beautifully crafted prose.

Augusta Locke is one of those rare novels that makes you appreciate good, detailed writing. I loved taking my time reading this book. I am looking forward to this author's next endeavor.

Best damn book I've read all year. Tough as fence post, bites like barbed-wire. Damned if Augusta Locke ain't real.

How does Henderson do it? --the characters and setting, the images and story. There's more style and substance on one of William Heywood Henderson's pages than between all of he covers on the New Release table at Barnes and Nobel put together.

"At night, when the weather allowed, Gussie and Mr. Foster laid out a tarpaulin on the ground, their bedrolls padding their bones, the sleeping box as breakwind, Anne (Gussie's child) had outgrown the box, and now she carefully laid out her own blankets, tugging at the corners to square and smooth the fabric. Beneath the stars, they all lay side by side, Anne in the middle. The stars filled the entire basin, no forests to catch the constellations, only famished cottonwoods. Gussie looked directly up into the night. The earth turned. The stars surrendered their positions.

Get this book new, you won't find many second-hand copies. It's the kind of novel people keep to read over and over again.

Having read William Haywood Henderson's previous novels, Native and The Rest of the Earth, in Augusta Locke he masterfully brings us to a happy resolve with the latest movement of the symphony that is his tales of the Wind River Range. From Blue's loss in Native, to Walker's building of a home out of raw materials of the mountains, Gussie journeys to find that home and connection with people and place that we all struggle to achieve, leaving us with a satisfaction rarely found. Henderson's writing is both entrancing and real, giving us a world into which we long to escape for its beautiful yet rough, imperfect edges. The people, like the land, are neither good or bad, just existing as best they can far from the "comforts" of the "civilized" world. As with his other works, Augusta Locke is definitely a book worth sharing with an ending uplifting for the sheer reason that it is true and not contrived as is often the case in today's entertainment media. I look forward to the next story that Henderson and the Wind River have for us.

Augusta "Gussie" Locke is born in 1903 in a remote section of the northern Minnesota woods. Her mother Leota always wanted a daughter to share dainty things with while her father is trapper Brud Tornig, who enjoys the outdoors. To Leota's regret and shame, Gussie is not pretty and precious, but more like her dad with a love for the woods. She runs away from home whenever the need to breath reaches her soul.

When Gussie catches her dad sleeping with a woman other her mother, she and Leota leave. They move to Colorado where Leota meets Mr. Locke and marries him. On the day they wed, Gussie leaves for Wyoming to hide amidst the mountains. She obtains work in the Great Divide Basin and meets a man on his way to fight overseas during WWI. They make love, and nine moths later with her lover gone off to war, Gussie gives birth to Anne. Soon Gussie will find things have gone full circle as Anne begins running away from home.

The historical tidbits and the background settings make for a superb early twentieth century saga. Gussie is an intriguing protagonist as she enables readers to see a remote part of 1920s an early 1930s Wyoming rarely if ever used in novels. The irony that the woes she gave to her mom her daughter provide to her will seem real to parents. Though insight into her needs for space is deep, readers never truly see what else motivates her for instance her selection in males. Still this is a deep look into a bygone era.

Harriet Klausner