Book Review:
Stranger from the Tonto


by Marian Coombs
Crofton, Maryland


It is the nature of Zane Grey's work that each book of his you read seems to have been the very best you've read so far. STRANGER FROM THE TONTO is no exception. Grey was a born hunter, and as is the case with most of his books, STRANGER takes you on a vividly-imagined hunt along a trail of adventure and romance, gets you there, keeps you there, and thoroughly satisfies.

Extraordinary -- a book not published until 1956, long after Grey's death, and every scene, almost every paragraph, is a fresh and refreshing take on the whole Western genre. You get a description of the famed Hole in the Wall and exactly how it functioned and why it was so hard to find; you get inside the soul of young Kent Wingfield as self-sacrificing love burns him clean of attachment to the temptresses of his past; meet an isolated girl with very believable gaps in her worldly wisdom and psyche.

And an outlaw chief the attractive power of whose personality almost compensates for his bloody ways; watch the machinations of a quirky outlaw band (or actually, two); you camp out in the desert, and see and hear and perform tasks along with the hero: "The night seemed enchanted. The hidden waterfall murmured and beat and sang, and lulled to let in the low deep thunder of the terrible river of the canyons. Coyotes mourned. The melancholy canyon owls hooted their whoo-te whoo-te whoo-oo-oo, and under the burning white stars the monuments and spires, the peaks and crags and the vast dark unbroken walls pierced the sky. . . . " Great stuff!!!

Marian Coombs is a Member of ZGWS. She lives in Crofton, Maryland.

This book review is the personal opinion of the writer.

Historical images of Zane Grey used with permission of Dr. Loren Grey and Zane Grey, Inc.