The Wandering Hill, the second volume in Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, retains the humor of the first installment, Sin Killer, while establishing a more meditative mood. Picking up where Sin Killer left off, The Wandering Hill finds noble English family the Berrybenders waiting out the oncoming winter at a high plains trading post, delaying their hunting expedition through the frontier-era American west. Tight confines force the spirited, bickering Berrybenders to contend with one another, as well as an assortment of colorful attendants and raw trappers. Conflict has arisen between fiery and very pregnant heroine Tasmin and her stoical, evangelical mountain man husband Jim Snow, a.k.a. Sin Killer. Selfish, randy patriarch Lord Berrybender, having lost a leg, seven toes, and three fingers thus far on their journey (though not his "favorite appendage"), is slowly losing his sanity. Malicious youngest child Mary begins an odd pseudo-sexual friendship with naturalist Piet Van Wely, while "foppish" heir Bobbety's no less ambiguous relationship with priest Father Geoffrin inspires his father to accidentally stick his son in the eye with a fork. In between many such self-inflicted disasters, three children are born, fierce native tribes attack, a man is sewn into a buffalo carcass, and many lives are lost, often in the presence of a strange, mobile hill whose legendary appearance signals impending doom. McMurtry, meanwhile, continues the momentum he built with Sin Killer, offering graceful storytelling, wonderfully dimensional realism, and deadpan wit. The wintry Wandering Hill, however, diverges from Sin Killer's madcap activity to further consider the inner lives of many of its splendid characters. McMurtry will have his fans clamoring for an answer, though delighting in his wandering path toward a resolution. --Ross Doll


From Publishers Weekly
This is the second volume in McMurtry's four-book series the Berrybender Narratives, following last year's Sin Killer. Set in 1833 along the banks of the Yellowstone River, the comedic melodrama mixes unwashed mountain men with an arrogant, obnoxious and uncouth family of English aristocrats in a saga of high violence, low morals and lusty copulation. Lord Berrybender and his brood of selfish bumbling children, servants and mistress are touring the American West, shooting every animal in sight. The lord is a one-legged, drunken satyr who cares only for his own pleasure, and pokes his son's eye out with a fork. The rest of the family is just as self-centered and irresponsible. Eldest daughter Tasmin, a vulgar, opinionated woman, is married to enigmatic mountain man Jim Snow, known as the Sin Killer for his fervent brutality in the punishment of sin (not his own, of course). He cannot understand why Tasmin willfully refuses to be more like his two Indian wives, silent, obedient and submissive. Still, their love is passionate and so are their fistfights. The English group and a bunch of smelly, hairy mountain men winter over at a trading post through months of quarrels, meanness and downright coarse behavior, while marauding Sioux under the command of a white man-hating war chief called the Partezon gruesomely torture and slaughter any white they can catch. McMurtry tosses in famous hunters and mountain men like Hugh Glass, Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick, plus a buffalo stampede, grizzly bears and an Indian ambush, but these are just props to support the soap-opera antics of the Berrybender clan. A few folks manage to get themselves killed, but there are plenty of annoying Englishmen left to people the next two volumes. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
In the second installment of the Berrybender saga, Tasmin and her eccentric family continue their journey through the American West. Tasmin is now married to Jim Snow, the Sin Killer of the first narrative, and their relationship and the impending birth of their child add to the drama that always seems to follow the Berrybender clan. As in any McMurtry novel, each character the reader meets has glorious quirks, and Alfred Molina gives an understated, eloquent performance that allows the language to shine. The novel sometimes lags between its big events, but it always returns to the path it intends to follow--that of a larger-than-life American adventure. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* This is the second volume in a projected four-part series following the aristocratic Berrybender family as they traverse various frontier river systems in the 1830s. As in the first installment, Sin Killer [BKL Ap 1 02], the feisty, passionate Tasmin Berrybender and her enigmatic, primitive husband, Jim Snow, occupy the center of the story. These two individuals are the most compelling and memorable of McMurtry's characters since Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call graced the pages of Lonesome Dove (1985). Now they and a fascinating cast of both fictional and historical characters interact in a wonderful pageant that re-creates the era of the mountain men who hunted and trapped along the upper Missouri and its tributaries. McMurtry offers a full range of Native American personalities, from chronically hostile Blackfeet to half-assimilated Utes to a frightening, sociopathic Lakota. The historical characters include a youthful Kit Carson, a grizzled Hugh Glass, and Pomp Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea. The latter was educated in Europe but is irresistibly drawn back to the frontier, and his efforts to navigate between two worlds are particularly poignant. The landscape is stunningly beautiful, but the beauty is often disrupted by spasmodic, gruesome violence. Nonetheless, this novel is an engrossing, exciting, and sometimes heart-rending saga of the American West that shows McMurtry at his best; and it will be in heavy library demand. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
New York Times Book Review Exquisite descriptions....Simply irresistible storytelling, rich and satisfying.


Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry continues his epic four-novel telling of The Berrybender Narratives with a new adventure that is both a grand literary achievement and riveting entertainment as forged by a master wordsmith.... The indefatigable Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family trek on through the unexplored Wild West of 1830s America -- and suffer the harsh realities of the untamed wilderness, including sickness, brutal violence and death, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of daily life in a land where survival is never certain. Filled with larger-than-life legendary figures such as mountain men Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, vividly rendered action, irresistible good humor, and an ever-changing cast of characters that readers will treasure, The Wandering Hill proves again that Larry McMurtry still reigns as the first statesman of the Old West.


About the Author
Larry Mcmurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and many other awards, is the author of twenty-five novels, two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, and is the editor of an anthology of modern Western fiction. His reputation as a critically acclaimed and bestselling author is unequaled.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
The second novel in Larry McMurtry's spirited and lively Berrybender series is packed with the the same blazing humor and satire as as its predecessor, Sin Killer. But The Wandering Hill also establishes a more thoughtful ambiance as the aristocratic Berrybender family perseveres on its quest through 1830s frontier America.

Trapped at a trading post by awful weather during a devastating winter, the contentious brood must contend with Indian attacks, a buffalo stampede, and boorish mountain men -- as well as one another. Raucous and playful, this installment in the saga is a highly amusing read populated with colorful, unforgettable characters -- a perfect blend of adventure, whimsy, and charismatic folktale. McMurtry's shrewd and astute narrative is filled with lissome prose, keen authenticity, and the kind of droll wit that will keep you chuckling nonstop. Tom Piccirilli

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s, at the point in time when the Mountain Men and trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, though still alive, are already legendary figures, when the journey of Lewis and Clark is still a living memory, while the painter George Catlin is at work capturing the Mandan tribes just before they are eliminated by the incursion of the white man and smallpox, and when the clash between the powerful Indian tribes of the Missouri and the encroaching white Americans is about to turn into full-blown tragedy." "Amidst all this, the Berrybender family - English, eccentric, wealthy, and fiercely out of place - continues its journey of exploration, although beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day survival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted." "Abandoning their luxurious steamer, which is stuck in the ice near the Knife River, they make their way overland to the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, to spend the winter in conditions of siege at the trading post of Pierre Boisdeffre, right smack in what is, from their point of view, the middle of nowhere. By now, Tasmin is a married woman, or as good as, and about to be a mother, living with the elusive young mountain man Jim Snow (The Sin Killer), and not only going to have his child, but to discover that he has a whole other Indian family he hasn't told her about." "On his part, Jim is about to discover that in taking the outspoken, tough-minded, stubbornly practical young aristocratic woman into his teepee he has bitten off more than he can chew - Tasmin doesn't hesitate to answer back, use the name of the Lord in vain, and strike out, though she is taken aback when the quiet Jim actually strikes her." "Still, theirs is a great love affair, lived out in conditions of great risk, and dominates

FROM THE CRITICS

People

McMurtry certainly has the talent to write a captivating tale of the early wild, wild West.

The New York Times

Action-packed set pieces appear at irregular intervals throughout the novel: Indian raids, a buffalo stampede, an accident-filled hunting trip. Sometimes they are comic turns (like the aborted ''escape'' of Lord Berrybender's Spanish gunsmith and Italian carriage maker, both broadly drawn Mediterranean types), but more often they are serious and dramatic. The eerie account of an Indian attack in dense fog is the artistic high point of the book. — David Willis McCullough

The Washington Post

"Chaos is the rule of nature," Henry Adams once wrote; "order is the dream of man." The tension between chaos and order -- or, in Larry McMurtry's terms, between wilderness and civilization -- fuels his admirable and much-admired 1985 masterwork, Lonesome Dove. This same tension drives with equal force the first two books so far of a planned four-book cycle he calls the Berrybender Narratives, which follows an aristocratic British family and its party as it tours, and then simply tries to survive, the far-from-civilized American West of the years 1832-36. — Robert Wilson

New York Times Book Review

Exquisite descriptions....Simply irresistible storytelling, rich and satisfying.

Publishers Weekly