Howard Frank Mosher
From the Missouri Breaks to the Rocky Mountains, and the Canadian border to Mexico, no novelist since Wallace Stegner has written as well about the American West as Larry McMurtry. By Sorrow's River, volume three of McMurtry's Berrybender Narratives, is no exception. It's lively, funny, historically illuminating and, best of all, full of unforgettable individualists, from an irascible English big-game hunter, Lord Berrybender himself, to his headstrong and beautiful daughter, Tasmin.
— The Washington Post
Kirkus Reviews
Third in the brutal and amusing saga of the dissolute Lord Berrybender and his lusty brood in the great American West (Sin Killer, 2002, etc.). Readers who have not been put off by McMurtry’s over-the-top (much scalping, butchering, piercing, dismemberment and spur-of-the-moment sex) take on the unsettled American frontier will be happy to follow the Berrybenders, whose numbers stay roughly constant as births in the bush balance deaths by all sorts of brutalities, as they take a big left turn from the undeveloped northern plains to head for purported comforts of Santa Fe. Berrybender, whose taste for big-game hunting seems unaffected by the loss of numerous limbs and digits, has returned his attentions to his erstwhile mistress, the distinguished cellist Venetia "Vicky" Kennet. Lady Tasmin, Berrybender’s beautiful eldest daughter, irritated by the constant disappearances of her free-range frontiersman husband Jim "Sin Killer" Snow, is now focusing her formidable energies on Pomp Charbonneau, diffident son of trapper Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea (yes, that Sacagawea). There’s a liaison, but an unsatisfactory one: Pomp, although he doesn’t disappear like Jim, is nowhere near as ready to, as Tasmin delicately puts it, rut whenever Tasmin is in the mood. Into the mix float a pair of European balloon-equipped journalists on assignment and their factotum, still bleeding from the midnight loss of an ear to the Ear Taker. Numerous Indians lurk in the neighborhood, but their numbers have been suddenly and devastatingly reduced by smallpox. Indeed, the great Sioux warrior known as the Partezon, whose maraudings nearly meant the end of the saga, correctly sees aviation and the plague as theend of the way for his people and heads for the Black Hills to die. Santa Fe lies on the other side of a seemingly endless desert, but the plucky Brits and their wild American assistants walk on. The Berrybenders may be de trop, but the scenery continues to be worth the trip. Agent: Andrew Wylie
From the Publisher
"In this tale of the exploration, and exploitation, of the West, McMurtry is telling us something about our checkered past — and perhaps about our uncertain present."
— People
"From the Missouri Breaks to the Rocky Mountains, and the Canadian border to Mexico, no novelist since Wallace Stegner has written as well about the American West as Larry McMurtry. By Sorrow's River is no exception. It's lively, funny, historically illuminating and, best of all, full of unforgettable individualists."
— The Washington Post Book World
"By Sorrow's River is a brilliant combination of adventure and plainspoken storytelling with a bittersweet love story and a richly imagined long-gone America."
— The Seattle Times
