Lonesome Dove for teens?

Today was a gorgeous day and the first day where it felt comfortable enough to have teatime outside. Here was our view.

Everything is starting to bud out and there is a light green haze beginning to cover all the trees and plants. I do love this part of spring. 

But onto Lonesome Dove. After three months, we are now a little bit over halfway through. Yesterday we read chapters 57 and 58. They were brutal. In my looking to see if this was an appropriate book for high schoolers I never saw these chapters mentioned. Had I known they were coming up, I would have skipped them and given a synopsis. Of course that would have meant I had to read them beforehand, and really I would have preferred a synopsis as well. You would think someone would have mentioned them. We were caught completely by surprise. And not in a good way. Plus, I have never been so angry at an author for killing off characters that I liked. It was just traumatic all the way around.

Today when we sat down to read, I said that I hope this next chapter would be less traumatic than the previous day's. L., clearly not having any faith in the author anymore, said, "I don't know. I'm pretty sure nothing good is going to happen until the ending." I'll also note that the end is hundreds of pages away.

The trouble, though, is that it is a very good book. The characters are unique and you feel as though you really know them. This is partly why I think yesterday's chapters were so hard. But I is also set in s brutal period of history and the characters are imperfect, sometimes extremely so. It makes for a complex and complicated book.

This is also how I felt about Pillars of the Earth. It was good, but hard in many places. There was a character that I learned to start skimming when his name appeared. I will be more cautious in this book now when I see another certain character's name. ,[For those who landed here hoping for an answer to the blog title, watch out for Blue Duck ] Skimming may yet happen. We'll see. It is the challenge of reading a book out loud that you are unfamiliar with.