Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove Story, Book 2)

I think McMurtry's Lonesome Dove books are hands down the best western books out there today. It's because of this series that the western genre has become so exciting for me to read. His discription of life in Texas in the mid 1800's is so descriptive, I can close my eyes and envision the places he writes about. First I read Lonesome Dove about ten years ago. Since then I haven't really read many westerns and have stayed primarily in the sci-fi\fantasy genre, but at the book store a couple weeks back I picked up Dead Man's Walk, the first story of Gus and Call. I bought it because I remembered how much I loved Lonesome Dove. I remembered laughing, crying and sitting there awestruck at how good a book it was. While Dead Man's Walk was not as good as LD, I still though it deserved five stars. It brought me right back to the world of LD. I also laughed out loud several times at the antics of Gus and I really loved that Mr. McMurtry put more humour in this book. After reading that I found out there were a couple of more books in the Lonesome Dove series, Streets of Laredo and Comanche Moon. I immediatley ran out and got Moon and Laredo. Moon was next in the series and I thought it perfectly showed how Gus and Call become the men in Lonesome Dove. This book wasn't as humorous as parts of LD and Walk as it had a more somber tone and much more death than the other two. Maybe it's because this is the final book McMurtry said he is going to write in the LD saga but that tone of finality is there. Especially with Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf I thought. I recommend this book and this series to anyone who likes westerns, love stories, grand adventures, great action, funny and poignant dialouge and another trip into the lives of Call and McCrae. Five out of five stars

Comanche Moon is the seemingly lost fourth volume of the Lonesome Dove series. I actually encountered it on a used book sale rack at my local library. I picked it up and was stunned to discover that it was an additional installment to the series by Larry McMurtry. I had bought and read the other three and enthusiastically read this one.Comanche Moon is actually the second book in the series and takes up where Dead Man's Walk leaves off. Comanche Moon is essential in that it provides much-needed connective tissue between Dead Man's Walk and Lonesome Dove. It brings Gus and Call back home after their failure in taking Santa Fe. It also paints much clearer portraits of important characters like Maggie, Newt's mother, and Clara Harris, the love of Augustus McCrae's life.Especially important are the answers to questions that Comanche Moon provides about Blue Duck. But I'll leave you to the book to discover those for yourself.No less than Lonesome Dove, Dead Man's Walk and Streets of Laredo, Comanche Moon is an incredible story in true Larry McMurtry style and, as already noted, is essential to the complete Lonesome Dove saga.

Having read many of McMurtry's books, including all in the "Lonesome Dove" series, I was anticipating a let down of sorts. I was pleasantly surprised with Comanche Moon. It developed many of the characters seen in Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, and even Dead Man's Walk. McMurtry's ability to truly explore the characters about which he writes is superb. His background and description of the villains made them seem very real, and the suffering of their victims was comparable with anything McMurtry's ever done. This was an outstanding book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who's acquainted with Captains Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae

"Comanche Moon" is described as the final volume of the "Lonesome Dove" saga although chronologically it is the second of the four novels, taking place between "Dead Man's Walk" and "Lonesome Dove". Readers of the other volumes in series will encounter familiar names here: Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, of course, but also Jake Spoon and Pea Eye Parker and Deets of "Dove", Long Bill Coleman and Buffalo Hump of "Walk", Famous Shoes and Charlie Goodnight of "Streets of Laredo" and others. As has become increasingly evident in his novels, McMurtry is not concerned with presenting a story of the West correct in all the minor historical details. For example, in "Comanche Moon" we find one character armed with a Winchester rifle 10 years before that weapon's introduction. Instead, his aim appears to be to create a story of about four parts gritty realism and one part romantic myth - and in "Comanche Moon" he achieves success. The novel abounds with characters more extravagant, larger-than-life personalities, yet these people are true to the story McMurtry is telling. Captain Inish Scull of the Texas Rangers and his wife, Inez, and the "Black Vaquero" Ahumado are unlikely to have had close real-life models, but in "Comanche Moon" they are forceful, fascinating figures. As is usual, McMurtry's characters are driven by their own obsessions. If I might sum up the theme of this novel, and much else of McMurtry's fiction, I would say that it would be "times change, people don't" - and not just "people" in the larger sense, but people as individuals, holding true to their own particular, narrow view of how they should live their lives. Characters like Woodrow Call and Inish Scull and Buffalo Hump are admirable because of their great integrity, no matter what destruction they seed while pursuing their individual visions of what is right. In "Comanche Moon", McMurtry's Indian characters - the Comanche Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf and the Kickapoo Famous Shoes - are perhaps more finely drawn than in any of the other Lonesome Dove books. They are not merely white men wearing paint and feathers. They live and die by their own logic, as alien as that system of belief may seem to a late Twentieth Century reader. Although any judgment must be subjective, I would rate "Comanche Moon" as at least the equal of "Streets of Laredo" and better than "Dead Man's Walk", although not so high as the magnificent "Lonesome Dove". I know that part of my enjoyment of the novel is my familiarity with several of the major characters, and my advice to any reader new to the "Lonesome Dove" saga would be to read the books in their order of publication rather than their chronological order of internal dates.