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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a nice surprise, May 15, 2001
I chose to read this series in chronological order and not the order in which they were written. This being the third to be written but last in order, I read this one last. I must say that I was surprised at how enjoyable a read it was seeing that the last two I read (The Pathfinder and The Pioneers) were pretty disappointing. This novel has excellent descriptions of the prairie setting and the characters involved without weighing the reader down with page upon page of needless descriptions or rhetoric. The story line was very well-conceived, plausable, and coherent; qualities which not many books can boast. Of course, this being the last book in the series, I was concerned about how the author would conclude the saga of Natty Bumpo. Not wanting to spoil anything, I must say that I was very impressed with the way Natty's character was handled. There is nothing worse than reading five or so books and having the author ruin them all by messing up the character at the end. No need to worry here. This novel pretty much has all the ingredients which make The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans exceptional: indian warfare, revenge, some romance, the differences and similarities between Natty's and the American Indian's religious views and philosophy on life, and of course just some good ol' action. I would recommend reading this series in chronological order, but if you do have to skip one of them, The Pioneers can be that one and you would not really miss a beat.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best Leatherstocking tale, September 2, 1998
By A Customer
This large, very elaborately written book is the first of the Leatherstocking tales Cooper wrote. It is, however, about Natty Bumppo's (aka Deerslayer, Leatherstocking, Hawkeye) final days. In this novel, he's more of a peripheral character, witnessing at least 2 other, very intriguing adventures. The story is integrated in fantastic descriptions of the prairie; reading it you can almost feel the beauty and power of the unenslaved American wilderness.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Anonymous Natty, December 26, 2003
James Fenimore Cooper's 1827 novel "The Prairie" is an epic adventure featuring two major plots, twelve major characters, and a cast of thousands. Set in the Great Plains shortly after the Louisiana Purchase (the Lewis and Clark expedition is mentioned en passant), "The Prairie" sets two Indian tribes, the Sioux and the Pawnee, against each other as well as two disparate groups of white travelers. Even though Cooper had reservations regarding Sir Walter Scott that writer's influence on Cooper cannot be doubted. (One of the characters in "The Prairie" is named Le Balafré, as is a character in Scott's "Quentin Durward", published in 1823.) On the other hand, Cooper's style foreshadowed Charles Dickens in many passages, particularly the powerful depiction of frontier justice in Chapter Thirty-two. The central section of the novel, with its siege of Ishmael Bush's encampment and the portrait of Bush's Amazonian wife Esther, seems to have affected Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls". There are two young heroines, one swoony and the other spunky; but there are several heroes, including Duncan Uncas Middleton, a descendant of characters from "The Last of the Mohicans", and Hard Heart, a Pawnee partisan. (Partisan is an obscure synonym for chief which Cooper uses throughout the book.) Then there is Cooper's most famous character Natty Bumppo, who had already appeared in "The Pioneers" in 1823 and "The Last of the Mohicans" in 1826. He was to figure twice more in the 1840's as a young man, but "The Prairie" describes his final days as a graybeard. The odd thing is he's never named -- he's simply called the Trapper. Evidently his Deerslayer days are over, though he's referred to as "venable venator" by the novel's comic relief character Obed Batt (or Dr Battius, as he pedantically prefers). One assumes that Natty had become such a popular character readers were not confused by his anonymity. At any rate, he carries the complicated narrative, partly because he communicates with both the whites and the Indians in their native languages. The narrative's flow is smooth and rapid, and "The Prairie" is a page-turner for a lazy afternoon or a long flight.
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