The Appointment

The action of this novel takes place in the West, but it is not a “Western”; and though its central focus is the life of Adaline Carson, daughter of the famed frontiersman Kit Carson, it is also not a biography. Set in the time of the California gold rush, it is a detailed and graphic elegy for America’s wide-open plains, rivers, and mountains and the people who lived in and passed through them, both for good and ill. The Appointment is a clear-eyed vision of how greed, love, frontier mastery and the beset Native tribes contended for control of this stupendous immensity, and how one young woman and her father were taken up in the resulting maelstrom that has become our history.