Review: TOUGH READ
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 25, 2013
Too bad Amazon doesn't have half stars. This novel should be a 2.5 Star.To start, I'm a big western fan, I own the entire Zane Grey and L'Amour libraries. "Scalp Mountain", while an interesting story line, left me wanting. To be honest, I'm not a fan of the first person style, except for  L'Amour (but then again, he was a master storyteller; one tends not to notice it in his stories) in this case, however, it was difficult to discern the difference between the POV of the narrative and the POV thoughts of the character--which were excessive.Putting the English translation after the use of a Spanish word was very off-putting as in  "Yes, jefe," boss., and "it tasted like cabrito, goat meat, cooked over mesquite." Again, not sure if this was thought or narrative. I also had a problem with the lack of accepted formatting; copy not justified, and not laid out according to Chicago Manual of Style. It was actually quite ragged. The lack of section breaks for location transitions and elapse of time made the exposition difficult to follow and had the tendency to run everything together.The dialogue was not to the period and was over-written--Sorry, a pet peeve of mine. The author does write reasonably good word pictures and metaphors that help pull the reader into the bubble.All-in-all, a good story and good characters. The execution needs a lot more work.