Badger Boy
The Texas frontier, spring, 1865. So begins this latest historical western novel by one of the long-time giants in the field, Elmer Kelton. This is the second in what may continue as a series of adventures of Rusty Shannon, a Texas ranger at the beginning of the book, and out of a job after the fall of the Confederacy. With Texas on the losing side, the frontier was no place for the faint-hearted. The families who lived there faced Indians, outlaws, bad weather and worse, often nothing but hardships, and as Kelton sees it, in doing so, they helped strengthen the backbone of America.
Badger Boy is a young white boy who Rusty rescues from the Comanches. After five years being raised as an Indian, the question is, can he survive being adopted back into his original culture?
Kelton’s writing is smooth and even, but the challenges he places in the way of his characters seem to be overcome in rather simplistic fashion. And since it’s likely there’s at least one more novel to come in this series, it unfortunately makes this one feel as though, yes, it ends, but no, the story is far from over.
