True Grit: A Novel

With its excitement, its aliveness, its comic sympathy and originality, True Grit swoops the reader up and gallops him off into a classic American adventure in a classic American landscape, freshly and brilliantly perceived. The action -- and what action! -- begins on page 1, as Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, sets out in the winter of eighteen seventy-something to avenge her Daddy, treacherously shot to death by a no-good drunken outlaw. Since not even Mattie (who is no self-doubter) would ride into Indian Territory alone, she "convinces" one-eyed "Rooster" Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, to tag along with her. As Mattie outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten types whose first reaction is "Run home, little britches, your mamma wants you," as her performance under fire makes them eat their words, her indestructible vitality and harsh innocence by turns amuse, horrify and touch the reader. What happens -- to Rooster, to Mattie, to the g