Review: An engaging feminist adventure story in the 1900s West
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 8, 2013
I was given a review copy of this book by the author. This my honest in-depth review.Cowgirl by Java Davis is part coming-of-age story, part adventure, and part western. Set in the  early 1900 decade, the novel starts with fourteen-year-old Risa and her eleven-year-old brother Yani, escaping from their California Jewish shtetl. Risa had just been betrothed to a rabbi's nephew, a Jewish custom she is fiercely against. Yani, on the other hand, has just been thrown out of the house after being caught having homosexual liaison with another boy.In her determination to escape the betrothal, Risa leaves town, taking her disowned brother with her.  Risa is strong-willed and we know she has what it takes to survive. This is proven time and again as sister and brother make their way into the wilderness, often walking for days plagued by hunger with Risa constantly having to discipline Yani for his bratty behavior.  It takes all of her patience to take care of him, but take care of him she did out of a sense of responsibility. They somehow end up in the Rancho Verde ranch in Nevada and were pitifully taken in by the Smiths.  Some readers may find Risa an unsympathetic and ungrateful character especially in how she dismisses the Smiths' kindness. But I think her actions have more to do with her being fiercely independent and strong willed, traits I respect in a protagonist. In the ranch, she befriends the foreman who teaches her how to break horses. This is when Risa's love for the outdoors comes out.  A year goes by and Risa feels stable enough to independently continue her way into the world.  Leaving Yani behind to the Smiths (Yani is now an "adopted" family member), Risa embarks on a journey of self discovery, living with a native American tribe and breaking horses for a living (since she is a girl, people considered it a spectacle to watch her break horses), the savings of which she invested wisely. She is quite astute with money and in a short time becomes a full grown entrepreneur buying small businesses when the opportunity presented itself.  This is also the time when she meets Patrick Garrett also known as Pretty Boy, an Irishman with whom she fell in love and married. Except he turns out to be a cad, frequenting brothels and going on drinking binges.  In Risa's eyes, he is as selfish and irresponsible as her brother Yani who by this time she'd set up to run a boarding house.Risa's story is a good one. Even though the narrative was sparse, it kept me turning the pages. Risa is an interesting character, engaging enough to prompt me to follow her story.  There are, however, transition issues in the first part of the book, many of them dealing with the passage of time.  Like the other reviewer, I felt the early part of the book was rushed. Details need to be filled in between changes in scenes to ground readers to the story. As an example, in their first day at the ranch, one moment they are in the bathtub cleaning the dirt off their bodies, the next moment and without proper transition, they are riding in a wagon to buy clothes and shoes. There are quite a few of these scene changes that transitioned so abruptly, sometimes from one character to the next, thus disrupting the narrative flow. Details also need to be filled in other aspects of Risa's life, such as how she was able to obtain enough money to buy a boarding house and be a silent partner in a brothel. Filling in these details will make the story much more believable and engrossing.  The good thing is, once I reached chapter five, the narrative got richer and the transition problems disappeared.Despite the rushed beginning, I think people will be drawn to Risa's story and enjoy reading the book.  She is a strong female protagonist, saddled by useless men, trying to cope with whatever cruel challenges life throws her way. This makes her sympathetic in my eyes.