To me, this was a less good/satisfying version of the Laramie Project.

well fuck i couldn't put it down and the ending made me cry. excuse me while i go read everything else this guy has ever written.

Percival Everett is a god.I keep saying this, but this man knows how to write characters you can actually get behind. He writes real, flawed, loveable characters, and when they fuck up you know why, and it makes them even better. This is a great short book about a black cowboy, and horses, and love, and you should totally read it.

what the f*ck????????

Predictable, but exceptional nevertheless.

This novel belongs in Percival Everett’s distinct canon of “Western Stories about Black Cowboys and Horse Trainers”—the material of his short story collection Half an Inch of Water and included in some other anthologies. This is a pretty traditional story. The pace is slow and calming. The cowboys' dialogue is cleverly laconic, the romance charmingly quirky, the crime intriguing. People talk a lot and say what they feel a la Women's Fiction, which usually turns me off. But since Percival Eve...

Beautiful and painful all at the same time.

Percival Everett is one of my favorite authors and this book was just as good as I had hoped it would be. I fell in love with the characters and I thought that most of the story had a wonderful ambling pace. A few days ago I got off at my subway stop and kept reading 'Wounded' while I was walking up the stairs and out of the subway. I heard this guy next to me gasp and I stopped just before I walked face-first into big metal beam. So I was nearly wounded while reading Wounded - ha.There were a f...

The writing was fantastic - slow and deliberate and descriptive. I found myself wanting to hurry the author on so we could get to the resolution or the next issue or just *on*. The pace fit the main character though and the story wasn't as obvious as I thought it would be. A great read which could've continued for many more chapters in my opinion but was still fantastic ending as it did.

this is not (thank god)some kind of hate-crime detective novel. the prose is lovely and spare, but i feel like the dialogue is a bit clever, or a lot clever, in places where it should just let go. that said, my experience with this book has been pleasurable, in large part just because i love to read prose about horses and land and mules and sky and fences and caves and small town folks with bad habits and nice children. all that, too, where the focus is not solely on white, herterosexual men.

If I were doing PopSugar this year, I would rejoice at having found such a marvelous Western to read. Though I've skipped that challenge for others closer to my interests, I'm still excited to have read my first novel by Percival Everett. Absolutely a book worth reading.

I give this book a 3.5 stars. I loved the fact that the protagonist in this story was a black cowboy horse trainer. As a black horse person myself, I appreciated that representation of the POC within this book. I also loved the fact that the author added in some LGBTQ characters as well. This story was the perfect read for my diversathon challenge :) As a old west fanatic I also relished in the representation in which I believe that the genre doesn't have enough of (which is pretty odd since at

I really liked this book and would have given it 5 stars, except the ending seemed very rushed. And, although I know it's a more typical of a modern novel, I hate an unresolved ending. The story focuses on a horse trainer in a small Western town. He happens to be Black and there happens to be a hate crime against a gay man in his town. The author explores racial prejudice and homophobia against the backdrop of the American West. The narrator is well written and I really liked his sense of humor....

Ok, first, the COVER. Great, eh?Now, the STORY. It was completely contrived and implausible, but I forgave all, I loved it, because ofThe CHARACTERS, who are completely human and plausible and as un-stock as characters can be.

Of all my brilliant, lit-appreciative friends who haven't read Percival Everett, I have one question: Why in hell haven't you read Percival Everett?! Seriously, don't put it off any longer. Contact me if you're interested and need suggestions of entry points.

Percival Everett returns marvelously to form after his mis-step with _American Desert_. Incredibly spare prose and dialogue matches both the western feel of the plot's locale and lends the novel its essential pacing. That efficiency also places Everett's usual (and almost always wonderful) satirical voice aside in favor of a more humane humour that then itself steps aside before the novel's touching climax and skewed, tragic ending.

I picked this up because I met the man once. I liked him fine. When I was browsing the shelf the other day for something to read and I realized I hadn't yet read this, I skimmed the first couple of chapters and liked the narrative device he starts with, so I grabbed it and tucked in for some solid fiction.Unfortunately, Everett drops that interesting device quickly, and the rest of the book is a downhill slide into quick, sloppy storytelling, full of cliches, exposition, and rushed plot. The set...

A black rancher, John Hunt, in Wyoming confronts his attitude toward homosexuality in the person of his godson.John's Uncle Gus, an ex-felon, is a great foil--asking the questions that need to be asked with a very clear view of the world. Saying it like this makes the story sound like pot boiler. It is not. This is a very character driven tale. I did find the reactions of the women in John's life, his wife who died six years previous to the story and his neighbor/girl friend puzzling.

This book is very interesting, beautiful and messy, but above all it’s very sad. Good read if you’re willing to follow Percival Everett into a nasty place and accept the narrative for what it is: part frontier myth, part cautionary tale, and fully brutal.

The African American cowboy experience is an interesting twist that Everett utilizes with consistancy. Whether purely stylistic ice cream, you can see this is an intelligence of a "wild" to coin a western phrase animale-author.American Desert still has the West, but without the landscape becoming a character and antagonist, as so often is the case in typical Westerns.Thus the balance between landscapes of vast eternity, (the desert being made for film with its horizons and vistas), and the chara...