Dobyns Chronicles
McLain’s lightly fictionalized version of the life and times of her great-grandfather Charley Dobyns, the son of a cowboy father and a Cherokee mother, is a solidly-told tale of the nineteenth and early twentieth century American West that follows Charley through the ups and downs of his life, from early prejudice resulting from his “half-breed” status to the hard realities of life on a Texas ranch constantly at the edge of survivability.
Charley’s family chronicle is considerably broadened and deepened by McLain’s excellent ear for dialogue and her knack for finding the precise right pacing for each episode she dramatizes. The story takes Charley through marriages and illnesses and hard times in several States, and the whole narrative is knit together mainly by the glowing composite portrait McLain paints of her ancestor’s personality, a good, simple man of determined optimism – and by her nostalgia-tinted rendition of American ways of life that have entirely vanished.
Readers who made Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s Great Depression-era Iowa memoir Little Heathens a surprise bestseller a decade ago will find a great deal to enjoy in McLain’s portrait of her family’s hardscrabble beginnings.
