Category: Literary Fiction Publisher: Cedar Creek
Type: Fiction
Pages: 248
Copyright: January 1, 2009
ISBN-13: 9780979020568
Aging cowboy Rhue Hogan can't remember falling off the wild mare, but his leg cast and the burial of his best friend are enough to send him back to New York City to find the son he's never met. As Rhue rides the train east, his 40 year old son Ford invites Evie Newton, a young woman he barely knows, to travel with him to bury his mother's ashes in New England. Struggling with what love means, but scared of commitment, both father and son dance around the possibility of redemption until they discover that heartfelt words have the power to build bridges.
Excerpt
And each farmhouse and ranch--expectant, windows lit, flags raised--stretched out across the country like parade watchers, cheering him onward to whatever was waiting for him, whatever it was that had made him leave everything he knew for nothing he could name, for the unknown, for the vacancy of open land and no neighbors.
Professional Reviews
Geroge Garrett
"I read Waltzing Cowboys with a great deal of pleasure. The writing is alive ... sense of place is excellent, and ... for all its dark side, it is, finally, a happy story about good people, unusual in this day and age. Unflinching, yet positive."
Lee Abbott, Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of All Things, All at Once
"Waltzing Cowboys is a splendid novel, in design and execution a fancy two-step the past does with the present. Ms. Honenberger is writer with a wealth of talent, all of which she wisely spends in the service of her characters, for hers is the notion that we servants of the 'liar's art' have the moral obligation to address the truths—slight and grand, welcome and not—that animate our crooked kind. Lordy, what sweet music this writing is to my ear."
Alan Caruba, Editor, Bookview.com
Increasingly one sees new novels from smaller publishing operations. An example would be a novel due out on January first from Cedar Creek Publishing in Bremo Bluff, Virginia. Waltzing Cowboys ($15.95, softcover) by Sarah Collins Honenberger had a good debut with her first novel, White Lies, and returns with a deftly written story of an aging cowboy, Rhue Hogan, who wakes up with his leg in cast, having been bucked off a horse. Combined with the death of his best friend, Rhue decides to reconnect with his son, Ford, now age 40. At the same time, Ford, joined by a young woman he hardly knows, has gone to New England in search of his Puritan roots on his mother’s side of the family. These are two men looking for some sense of identity and closure. The story is that trip back to the past for both and it is a short, but fascinating novel.
My second book is about a boy who has Asperger's Syndrome and is bullied to the point to where he shoots up his school. I have divided the excerpts from it into three parts: Before, during and after the shooting.