Customer Reviews

Rest and Be Thankful

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

 

 

Being a citizen of the west, Rest and Be Thankful lets me revisit the community celebrations and friendly, but schrewed folks that I have known throughout my life. The characters of the book are real, humourous, complex and occasionally surprising. The story is a delicious read. Also, I have listened to the audio of this book. Great companion for traveling, gardening, or repainting a room.

"Rest and Be Thankful" is the name given to a green island, sheltering between the forks of Crazy Creek, high in the Wyoming hills. Here, in pioneer days wagon trains coming over the Stoneyway Trail halted before they continued westward.

Two friends, Mrs. Peel and Sarah Bly wandered off the State Highway which they were following to California. Their background was the salons and culture of France, not the wild west. Having found this wonderful place they wanted to share it with their circle of literary hopefuls and authors, which they invited to come.

The charm and humor of this story lies in the varied reactions and interactions of these Easterners as they confront the magnificence of the scenic grandeur they encounter, along with the simple genial frankness of its occupants, the owners and cowboys of Flying Tail Ranch. We are dealing with humorous colliding cultures here.

Another of her short post-war non-thriller phase. Friends And Lovers is set in the tense pre- WW2 era; Rest And Be Thankful is set in the tense pre- Cold War era.

While politics (of nations and of art) get discussed (and moralized upon), the plot is really a straight romance.

What makes it seem dated, surprisingly enough, is its non-thriller nature. Some of the relationships and most of the dialogue (as well as the setting) didn't ring true to me when I first read the book in the 80s. These days they seem even more divorced from the current world. Almost more like reading Jane Austen.

And the relationship betwen the cowboys and the Indians sometimes seems wonderfully human, while other times seems like something out of a bad Hollywood script.

After this book MacInnes started in with her Cold War thillers and never looked back.

Lovely book by a true master. It is an educational piece or work written by an author who was annoyey by armchair communists and fellow travelers. It rings true and has an appealing gentleness about it. Some decent character development that makes it worth reading. (Read Decision at Delphi to discern her attitude about communists.)

Amusing characters --mostly unpublished writers-- spend a summer on a working ranch in beautiful Wyoming. This novel has less tension and violence than most MacInnes novels; there is plenty of fun and satire. Makes me wish I had been invited too.

I have read eight books by Helen MacInnes:
127 Assignment in Brittany, by Helen MacInnes (read __ ___ 1943)
128 Above Suspicion, by Helen MacInnes (read __ ___ 1943)
2099 Cloak of Darkness, by Helen MacInnes (read 13 Sept 1987)
2556 Prelude to Terror, by Helen MacInnes (read 28 Nov 1993)
2583 The Salzburg Connection, by Helen MacInnes (read 19 Feb 1994)
3242 The Snare of the Hunter, by Helen MacInnes (read 8 Sep 1999)
3249 Neither Five Nor Three, by Helen MacInnes (read 4 Oct 1999)
4086 Rest and Be Thankful, by Helen MacInnes (read 31 Oct 2005)
This is undoubtedly the worst of the eight, tho Neither Five Nor Three is also not worth reading. There is no thrill nor any suspense in this book so if that is what you like about MacInnes books this is to advise you that this book has none of such. This is an insipid account of two women who buy a house on a ranch in Wyomaing, invite some New York writers to it, and then tell what was said and done, usually with the idea that the Wyoming natives are much smarter and more interesting than those stupid New Yorkers. I think this is the least interesting book I have read this year.