Customer Reviews

The Heritage of the Desert

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The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey is western novel. The book mainly focuses on Mormon culture through a group of people in 1890 Utah.

The book revolves a great deal around the character of August Naab, a landowner and cattle rustler. Naab refuses to sell his land to an outlaw named Holderness. Holderness has bought, or stolen all the land surrounding the area, and now wants Naab's to provide a route to water for his mostly stolen herd of cattle. Soon, Naab hires a surveyor named John Hare to watch over his land.

Hare has come from the west to clear his mind and start fresh. Along the way however he crosses a scoundrel named Dene and is saved by Naab, and finds his job working for Naab as an escape, as Naab will not allow Dene anywhere near his land. Soon after starting his work for Naab however, he runs into a problem. Hare begins to fall in love with Naab's son Snap's fiancée, a Native American woman named Mescal. Hare and Mescal's growing relationship only adds more tension to the already sour relationship between August Naab and Snap, partly due to Snap's gambling debts he owes to Holderness. Snap becomes so jealous that he makes an attempt on Hare's life, who refuses to defend himself because he is Naab's son, despite the fact that Naab does not care what happens to Snap. Soon, all of this is built up into one violent climax.

The book is a little bogged down by this over complicated plot. Many of the storylines slow the pace of the book and can reduce your overall enjoyment of the book. The characters are also a large problem, as many of them aren't very interesting and are hard to identify with. I never really felt a connection with any of the characters, as they all seemed either too rough or too innocent to be very dynamic. Much of the dialogue is an issue as well. It rarely flows as a real conversation would and sentences seem long and blocky, which really slows the action down at times. I often found my mind wandering as I read the particularly slow parts of the book.

That's not to say the book is all bad. At times I was wrapped up in the story and was interested to find out what happened next and to read more, but those thoughts were often quickly silenced by another slow conversation that didn't do much to progress the overall plot.

Zane Grey's style of writing is a little difficult to get used to. The slow pacing and weak characters sometimes make reading the book a little cumbersome, but it is still a satisfying story. This book sparked Grey's popularity as a western novelist, which led him on to a strong career. However I found the plot too much to bear when I really wanted to sit down and enjoy the book.