Pick Up The Legend Of Sam Miracle (Outlaws Of Time, #1) Author N.D. Wilson Digital Copy

from the getgo. I love the way Wilson writes villains as really evil without being gratuitous and doesn't shy away from pain in his stories, I love how he writes main characters the reader can actually root for flawed, learning, growing, dependent, human, good, I know this is YA fiction, but whatever its just good fiction, This is his most recent book, and it's definitely my favorite, Fascinating story. Profound truths. Colorful writing. It's everything a Christian story should be, Excellent! Really fun book, filled with twists and turns and death and life, It is hard to imagine the characters at the end are the same as those at the beginning,

Time travel is hard. Wilson does a good job with it, Plus I live in West Virginia and I have a Sam and a Millie so that made it extra special, I had to do some explaining to the younger kids as I read, but the older ones loved it,

My Rating System

StarTerrible book and dangerous, Burn it in the streets,

StarsReally bad book, would not recommend, probably has some dangerous ideas in it or could just be so poorly written/researched that it is not worth reading.
Few books I read areorbecause I am careful about what I read,

StarsEither I disagree with it at too many points to recommend it or it is just not a good book on the subject or for the genre.
Would not read it again, reference it, or recommend it, But it is not necessarily dangerous except as a time waster,

StarsSolid book on the subject or for the genre, This does not mean I agree with everything in it, I would recommend this book to others and would probably read it again or reference it, Most books fall in this category because I try not to read books I dont think will be good, There is a quite a variety here,.is pretty far from

StarsExcellent book. Classic in the genre or top of the line for the subject, I might also put a book in here that impacted me personally at the time I read it, I would highly recommend this book, even if I do not agree with all that it says, Few books fall in this category, Over time I have put less in this category,
A rollicking good Western with a few twists,
Sam Miracle is caught up in a story he doesn't remember, A priest can move him through the sands of time, and lays down his life for him, but he needs Glory's help to beat the bad guys,

Wilson messes with time creatively, a favorite theme of mine in the scifi genre, and it was fun to see it at work in a Western setting.
My boys ate it up as I read it out loud, Can you have courage and tenacity in the face of obstacles, like Sam Miracle Can you control your destructive anger the snake Cindy What do you do when your reliable skill the snake Speck isn't good enough to stop the bad guys

Lots of good themes like that.
Get this for youryear olds, especially, I put off reading this for so long, and then I finally did read it because a I had just read To Say Nothing of the Dog, a book I managed to enjoy despite being full of time travel, which made my brain go, “oh, its possible,” which subsequently made my brain go, b well, if anyone can write time travel in a way I dont hate its gonna be N.
D. Wilson.

Turns out no one can.

I do like this description of time:
”Time is beyond your comprehension, Time is a wind. Time is an animal. Time is choices. Time is light woven into song, Time is the Poet speaking the next word, We are small, and so we hear and live one word at a time, living the way you would read a book, Outside of the book, where only the Author exists, there is no time at all, It is not even a book, It is one endless, evergrowing but alreadygrown page, Most people live in the lines, but I march in the margins, I am sent to make the edits, the notes, the corrections, You and I and all creatures are ink on the page, but I can lead up through the white space between the words, where time is thin, I can lift you off the page until only your shadow is dragging behind, ”

Particularly the part about the Poet speaking the next word, I dig that,

Reading this monologue delivered by Father Tiempo, a beautiful character, near the books beginning, I thought maybe I could get behind however the time travel would work.
Maybe someone could make it work for me,

The notion that time is choices, That individual choices have infinite significance, Sensitive dependence on initial conditions, Seriously just make it chaos theory and I like it apparently Those things are important to me, If you can use time travel to explore those themes, I am along for the ride,

But thats the paradoxical problem of the whole “choices matter” thing, One persons choices can change the course of history, meaning all the choices made subsequently DONT matter, Thats the problem with time travel, The fact that you can unmake the infinitely important choices of PEOPLE, Its so wrong. I cant STAND it.

And if you try to solve it by simply saying oh, when that happens, you branch off into a new stream of time, an alternate version, . . then you just end up with a multiverse situation and its weird and dumb, We are not told what would have happened, Aslan tells us, and you know what I think theres a reason for that,

Anyway. Three because Glory was great, the writing was great as ever, I had just watched Tombstone before watching this so the scene with Doc Holliday and the Earps made me stupidly happy , and Father Tiempo and Sam and sacrifice and action and the desert and caves and Manuelito and just.
. . yeah. N. D. Wilson is a great storyteller, But no time travel for me, THANKS, " how you feel means nothing," the priest said, "What will you do"

Words to live by, Whatever kind of story you like plotdriven, characterdriven, deepmeaningdriven, or just plain crazily imaginative N, D. Wilson delivers the whole constellation time after time, I've read almost everything he has written, both fiction and nonfiction, and for now, at least, this my favorite on the fiction side, I trust that as great books continue to flow from his word processor, I'll find it harder and harder to pick a frontrunner,

I wish I could write some superintelligent reason for why I like it best, but you know me, . . Miss Subjectivity. It just grabbed my heart, I love glorious Glory and I hope she inspires a revival of the name Gloria, which is shamefully underused, I love the apostley posse, I love faithfulasarock Father Tiempo, I love the way they all love Sam, laying down their lives for him, allowing him to be heroic despite being so broken,

All that and, . . snake arms!!!

I received an advance reader copy of this book, May: I gave up hoping for the third book to show up in audio and am relistening to the first two to gear up for finally reading it in print.
Story always wins. Glory and Sam know this, Killing the dragon isn't enough if the hero doesn't also get the girl, I'm not one of those people who has a strong visual sense of what I read, but much of this book is almost cinematic to me thanks to the descriptive writing.
I only get a little lost in some of the more fantastical bits, Good soul food.

May: Got it on audio, so I get to review this edition, too my print review is sitelinkhere, I need to relisten to the last couple of chapters, I got distracted at one point and lost track of how somebody got somewhere or somewhen, The Legend of Sam Miracle is still my favorite of N, D. Wilson's fiction, and Glory Spalding is still my favorite character in it, I'm also listening to Fellowship of the Ring when I'm in the car, so her similarity to my my favorite LOTR character has been on my mind.
They both have a bold, tenacious, selfsacrificial loyalty that I can only aspire to, But being a girl, Glory's helper role is, well, lovelier than Sam's, Even when clad in grubby long johns, Since there's so much meaning in the names in the book, I find myself wondering if Spalding has any significance, There's a Spalding, Idaho, not too far from Wilson's home in Moscow, It's named after Henry Spalding, whose wife sitelinkEliza was cut from the same cloth as Glory, Coincidence I'ma go out on a limb and think not, On the other hand, perhaps Wilson just likes sitelinkbasketball, but if that were the case, you'd think he'd go for sitelinkthis one, Rumor has it I think it was in some interview with the author there's more of Glory's story in the next book, I am eager. As for the Rose of Sharon reference in El Buitre's name, I'm stumped, I used to know a Bill Rose, He wasn't very vulturine.

Knowing sitelinkthe author's voice, it's hard for me to listen to somebody else reading his books, but MacLeod Andrews does a very fine job, I especially appreciated his characterizations, which differentiated well without straying into toohammedup territory,

Oh, and I really need to see sitelinkTombstone, Quite good. Nate Wilson has a real gift, and the sheer inventiveness of the world he created was enough to impress, Snake arms What : This star rating HURTS, Really. I almost bumped it up to three based on my love of the author's other work, but in fairness if this was a book by an unknown author, it would get a two.
Trying to stay honest here,

originally posted sitelinkhere at Random Musings of a Bibliophile,

It is always hard when an author you typically love writes a book that you don't really love, I've read every single book N, D. Wilson has written and usually I put them down full of love and ready to gush, My feelings about his latest work, the first in his new Outlaws of Time trilogy, are far more complicated and my reaction mixed, The Legend of Sam Miracle has some excellent parts, but there are some elements that made me uncomfortable,

Sam Miracle is confused, The life he leads at his home for boys is simple, He works. He learns. He relaxes with his friends, But there are moments when he is in his head living lives of adventure and danger, Unlike most people's daydreams, Sam's do not have happy endings, He dies in the end every time, But he still loves the dreams even if they sometimes cause him to wander off into danger unknown because in them is arms don't hurt and they bend as they are supposed to.
In his real life they are useless, damaged beyond help in a horrible accident, When a new doctor shows up at the ranch to take a look at Sam, the world as Sam knows it is flipped inside out, The doctor is not a doctor, but an outlaw sent through time to track Sam down and kill him, Sam finds himself torn out of a time he thought was his own and discovering that his dreams aren't dreams, but memories, And he has one last chance to change the end of his story,

The world and plot of The Legend of Same Miracle is ambitious, These two elements of the story work really well, Wilson's imagery brings the American west to vivid life: the heat, the harsh sun, the dryness, the sand, This is a story of outlaws and cowboys very much steeped in the mythology of the old west, There is a lot of adventure, peril, and heroics, The villains are the sort who have no trouble torturing and killing young people, They've done it numerous times and pulled time apart to do it again, This gives the sense of peril in the book the realistic edge I expect from Wilson, His fantasies have teeth, and I've always appreciated that, Sam keeps getting another chance to get things right even after dying multiple times, The mechanics of this and the time travel are vaguely alluded to, but it isn't necessary to understand how it works to know that it does, The plot bounces between the linear story of Sam discovering again who he is and going about this attempt to make his story right and the flashbacks to his past lives.
Once the adventure starts the reader also gets to see what the main villain is up to with some moments showing what Sam's sister Millie is enduring, The book is difficult to put down, and it has Wilson's signature descriptive prose that hooks the reader and holds them to the end, It also has quite a bit of humor, The acronym for Sam's home is SADDYR and there are delightful motivational phrases to go with each letter posted on the wall, Thematically the book is what I've come to expect from Wilson as well, There are a great many of lines that are quotable and had me nodding and smiling,

The problems I have are with the characterization, It is hard to feel connected to Sam because he is so confused and doesn't really know who he is for much of the novel, He is clueless and incompetent, which is completely understandable given everything he goes through, However the turn around on that is far too abrupt, This is partly due to how his arms are "fixed", but he has a major change in attitude too, It's like the first half of the book and the second half of the book have two entirely different main characters, and it's not clear how or when they were switched out.


My biggest problem with the characterization is with the other major characters, Three important people in Sam's journey are members of the Navajo nation, I know Wilson's intentions here came from a genuine place, He wrote about it here, The end result left me uncomfortable though, All three characters are very much the magical Native American, Their sole purpose in the narrative is to drive the story of the white hero, One of them sacrifices everything for him, These characters were problematic on several levels, It takes an actual Native hero away from the work with his actual people and nation and focuses his attention on this random white kid, The way they talked about communing with animals and had this strange magic made me squirm, It felt very much like Disney's Pocahontasa white person's cobbled idea of what Native Americans are,

The Native characters made me uncomfortable, The female characters made me angry, One reason I have never really liked westerns is that the women in them either tend to be agentless bodies to be raped/tortured/murdered to advance the male protagonist's story or evil manipulators working for the baddy.
Sam's sister is the former, And she's had to endure it a thousand times over, She has a brief moment of agency when she snarks the villain, but she still needs to be rescued at the end and the reader is left with no sense of who she is as a person outside of who she is to Sam.
His motivation. Blech. The main female character is Glory, She is the daughter of Sam's foster parents, and for plot reasons gets swept up into the story, She has a little more agency than Millie, She actually chooses to accompany Sam and help him, It was a heroic thought, She does help in saving his life, Then she spends the rest of the book as his secretary for all intents and purposes, Oh, and she also needs to be rescued by him, More than once. Again, I ended the book with no real sense of who she was apart from her role in Sam's life, The only other female character in the book is evil, This made me even more angry because I expect better of Wilson, I can't believe this is the same author who wrote Henrietta, Antigone, Diana, and Arachne, I KNOW HE CAN DO BETTER,

Will I read the second book Yes, I will because Wilson's past seven novels have earned my trust, I'm willing to stick around to see how he deals with some of this later on, It's a book that I can't wholeheartedly recommend on its own merits though, And that makes me sad,

I read an ARC made available by the publisher, Katherine Tegen Books, via Edelweiss, The Legend of Sam Miracle is on sale Aprilth, .