Customer Reviews

Promised Lands: A Novel of the Texas Rebellion (Southwest Life & Letters)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Very readable book about the Texas War of Independence with Mexico. Although a fictional book, it accurately shows the real issues in the Texas War. The "heros" of the Texas Revolution such as Fannin and Bowie were shown to be men who made serious mistakes in the war. Some of the issues surrounding the "war" such as slavery were documented. While I have read several books on Texas History, this book brings out new information and facts through the fictional setting. The horror of Goliad was accurately protrayed in this book. This is truly a book that is hard to put down once it has been started. There are touches of Jean Auel in the author's writing style. It is obviously a well researched book that even documents in detail the early use of "natural" medicines

I'm not a Texas history buff but this story is fascinating. It captured my interest right at the beginning and picked up steam all the way to the end. It has everything you want in historical fiction: romance, humor, violence, tragedy, and characters you care about. It has funny scenes and extremely amusing dialogue mixed in with the tragedy. It's also beautifully written. There are two or three plot lines in the beginning but I was happy to go from one to another as they all interested me, and as they came together fairly quickly. If you're looking for a great epic, this is a perfect selection. It's not light reading, but enriching and satisfying. Highly recommended.

This is a very readable selection concerning early Texas history and in particular, the "runnaway scrape." The author makes you feel like part of the family before it is over.

Elizabeth Crook's novel, Promised Lands captivated me. Her research so accurate and her characterization so poignant that I feel like I lived the times with these people. And though Fannin's indecision, the subsequent cause of his downfall, stings the Texan,history is never made up of simple infallible characters. My imagination was so piqued, I revisited Goliad after reading the book. Reading Ms. Crook's novel illuminates the past and it is beautifully written. And outstanding work and yes,a must for every student of Texas history.

Promised Lands, by Austin author Elizabeth Crook, is a grim novel about grim people caught up in one of the grimmest incidents in Texas history, the Goliad Massacre of 1836. And did I mention that the book is grim?

In following two families as their fate puts them on a collision course with history, Promised Lands is based on a time-honored premise for historical fiction. But Crook, who showed her skill in writing about emotionally damaged people in her earlier novel The Raven's Bride, does not settle for easy cliches about high-spirited women and two-fisted men. The characters in Promised Lands are extraordinarly complex and finely drawn. On the Anglo side of the divide, we follow the Kenner family, particularly dad Hugh, a doctor who has given up practice; daughter Katie, a young woman who yearns to feel needed; and son Toby, a bespectacled boy who wants nothing more than to prove himself. On the Tejano side, we follow the brother-sister pair of Adelaido, an arrogant young caballero, and Crucita, an introspective seamstress whose kindness tears her between love and loyalty.

One of the problems in Promised Lands is the number of characters. Besides the five primary characters mentioned above, there are a half-dozen more point-of-view characters, all with complex motivations, back stories, and emotional baggage. I think that because of the large cast, the story never achieves much momentum. I felt I had to press a mental "Reset" at the beginning of every chapter to follow someone new. Even within a chapter, there is some "head jumping" to include the thoughts and motivations of even minor characters. While the writing is skillfully handled, I got frustrated after a while. This novel is stuffed with enough characters and ideas for three novels. I wish Crook had done some cutting and perhaps refocused the novel on just a few characters. For example, it would have been interesting to see what she did with a book that followed just Katie, Crucita, and Toby, allowing us to see the others only through their eyes.

I also became weary of the depression that enshrouded most of the characters. While I didn't expect a rollicking good time with a book on the Goliad Massacre, I think the novel might have been improved with if the characters had been more varied. Several of these folks were significantly traumatized before the novel even began. A couple of smart-alecks would have provided some much-needed relief for the reader and maybe even have added some good interpersonal conflict to the story.

I read this book when it came out in 1994, and again this year, 2011. Loved it both times. I returned to the book because I remembered that I had slowed down my reading because I didn't want to leave the characters. They were that real to me and I cared about them all. I also had taken a trip to the Presidio la Bahia and was so moved by the haunted feel of the place. I wanted to read again about what happened there.

This is a must-read book for every Texan. But you don't have to be Texan to love this book. It's more than a history story. The characters' struggles, fears, joys, and loves are universal. Buy this book! (Or get it at your local library.)

Having read the critical review titled, "A novel filled with dread, ghastly events, and remorse", I wasn't sure what to expect in purchasing Crook's Promised Lands. I was guessing that the writer of that review prefers a more romanticized, rather than realistic, view at history. As an avid history buff and professional genealogist, I prefer a realistic approach to historical fiction and Crook definitely delivered. The book was well written and well-researched keeping me up late at night unable to put it down. Truth is definitely stranger than fiction and Crook's ability to stay true to the time period, in all its prejudices, without glamorizing historical figures such as Sam Houston is what made this book well worth reading. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to enjoy an excellent story expertly woven into the realities of the time.

Excerpt from a web site review of this book, and my opinions....


The Texas Revolution in Fiction

by Jeff Guinn

Eight pages into Promised Lands, Elizabeth Crook's mesmerizing new novel about the Texas Revolution, a settler family has been massacred by a band of Yamparika Comanches.

It's a bloody massacre, too, with a child being skewered by an arrow, a nursing mother butchered and a man scalped alive. Gory details are plentiful in this initial scene, and plentiful throughout the next 500 pages. 'Very bloody
indian attack, and savage indian reprisials for whites invading their lands. survival was the modus for both sides, and in this instance the indians won, and celebrated with mutiliations, and looting. seemed very honest straight to the heart of a savage people defending their way of life in an unforgiving land"

As one critic noted of Promised Lands (Doubleday, $22.50), "the events are real and the descriptions are truthfully brutal and grotesque."

Because what else was Elizabeth Crook to do? On a recent Fort Worth visit, the 33-year-old Austin author said she had wanted this, her second novel, to be "a big, old-fashioned epic about love and war." Crook succeeded in splendid fashion -- Promised Lands may easily be one of the very best novels published in 1994 -- but the author's determination to be accurate in capturing the routine violence of 1835-36 Texas may never be properly appreciated in a publishing world that routinely consigns male and female novelists to separate reading markets.

"We haven't exactly known how to market this book," Crook said candidly. "I mean, it's about a war. That's the subject. But my photo [on the dust jacket] looks like I'm 18 years old. Men can get by with writing about serious subjects in this society even if they look or are very young. And like most young men writers these days, I've never been to war. So in researching, I had to fight very hard to make all my battle facts correct; I couldn't take some liberties with accuracy I think a man could take."

Accordingly, Promised Lands is grittily realistic. But you wouldn't know it by the dust cover, which is pretty with lots of pinks and purples and a swirly typeface, lacking only the depiction of a cleavage-flashing ingénue to mimic the art on the front of those ubiquitous ladies-market-only "bodice ripper" titles. "it was a surprise, as to how it diifered from what the cover and backpage presented"

"I guess it's a little, uh, florid," Crook finally admitted, torn between loyalty to Doubleday, her publisher, and the sure knowledge most men browsing through the bookstores wouldn't glance twice at such pastel profusion. "I think people, when they look at this, would expect a romance, and it's a saga."

A fine sage, in fact, and exceptionally well-researched: Crook said she started her Texas Revolution homework for the project in 1986, and confounded Doubleday by writing her epic without the usual author's crutch of a plot outline.

"I knew who my characters were, two families, one Anglo and one Tejano, and whether each one would live or die," Crook recalled,." Doubleday wanted an outline, one that said what was going to happen in each chapter. I didn't want one. Writing that way is very liberating. There's nothing more boring than an outline. It's insecure, certainly -- like real life, you don't know what will happen when you get up in the morning. I like that kind of writing -- there's more feeling to it."

Crook experienced especially strong feelings when writing battle scenes.

"I don't enjoy violence," she said, "but it's easier for me to write violence than to read it or see it, because I have control of it. There's some comfort in that."

There's also an advantage here in Crook's being female, both for writer and reader: "I do think I brought something to these scenes a man couldn't have brought. I see battle differently than they do. Battles are very sad to me. Maybe men see them as glorious. I find them compelling, too, but in a gruesome kind of way." " it did have a tone , i had not seeen in other westerns about texas"

Crook's initial book, The Raven's Bride, was a fictionalized account of the brief, troubled union of Texas Revolutionary hero Sam Houston and his young wife. Since Promised Lands is set in the same era, Crook says she knows she's in danger of being pigeonholed.

"I don't want to be seen as a regional author," Crook insisted. "That happens especially to writers from Texas. If somebody from New York writes a couple of novels about New York, nobody starts calling them 'New York writers,' but that happens to us in Texas. And once you're categorized, reviewers always look at your work in the context of that one genre. I want somebody to notice my writing, and that doesn't happen unless you write contemporary fiction."

So Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Crook's editor at Doubleday, can expect a different kind of Crook novel next time around?

"I have very definite intentions of writing contemporary fiction next time," Crook said. "I have my ideas and I'm working on them. I will not be categorized as a regional writer.

"Also, I'm tired of having to do so much research!"

Maybe you have to be a true Texan to enjoy this book. I gave up a quarter of the way through.