The part of Vanderhaeghe's novel that was the most powerful to me was the fate of the Indian girl after the massacre by the wolfers. I was terrified while reading about what they heartlessly did to her. Vanderhaeghe did a great job keeping this section of the story in the same style as the rest of the chapters about the wolfers. There really wasn't any emotion exhibited from the storyteller during even this intensely emotional event. At first I didn't think that the author told what happened to the girl with any justice but then I remembered that it wasn't supposed to be written from any one person's point of view.
It hurt to find out that in the end McAdoo thought that Harry was responsible for selling out his story and the Indian girl. Harry and McAdoo appeared to me to be similiar characters in some ways. They were both loners and easily taken advantage of. Neither had had a very strong father role model, McAdoo's being a violent drunk and Harry's running off and leaving him and his mother alone. And despite their hard lives with a lack of love or facilitated success they were both good hearted men.
This is obvious through McAdoo's compassion for the Indian girl and his dream to one day marry the girl that he had had to leave to go with the Englishman. And Harry not accepting the prostitute at Chance's or ever being spiteful of Rachel even though she was as phony as the rest of Hollywood.
I think the strong hearts of these two men and how similiar they appear are important aspects of this novel. I don't know if this was a common thought for others in class who read the book but throughout it I continued to feel as if both Harry and McAdoo were more alike than they even realized.

Well, I brought up my mixed feelings about this book in class and it seemed that I was largely in the minority. I did enjoy quite a bit about the book but I still found problems with it.

I felt the pace of the novel was excellent - there was consistently something happening, but the twin stories built gradually enough to make the climax worth waiting for. Similarly, the mirror development of the two stories allowed for an interesting breed of foreshadowing. However, one aspect of this mirroring did grate on me - the emotive tones of the two stories follow each others' leads, but I found that one result of this was a sort of undeserved character development. Harry inherited Shorty's pathos by the end of the novel, having not gone through a particularly traumatic experience himself. Shorty bears first-hand witness - in fact, he is implicated as a participant - to a brutal rape and murder, a horrific, bloody, and most of all pointless battle which claimed the lives of not only a few dozen Indians but also Shorty's mentor Grace. Following the tragedy, he apparently experiences a mental breakdown but eventually reverts to his essential reticent self, though perhaps more so than before. Harry, on the other hand, is touched by Shorty's sad story, but knowingly (or, if he didn't know, he should have) sells the rights of it to a megalomaniac. The megalomaniac turns out to be xenophobic, including anti-Semitism, which affects Harry's sensibilities because of his semi-platonic relationship with the Jewish Rachel. By the end, the egotist Chance, the brute Fitzgerald, and the relatively innocent if gullible and slow Wylie are dead. The point is, Harry retreats into a brooding solitary existence, like Shorty did, but had much much less reason to do so.

Really, the only other problem I had with the book was that, for all of its apparent reverence of accuracy and realism, it was occassionally peppered with hokey occurances, but more often by cheesy and unbelievable dialogue. This is one of the trickier parts of a narrative to get right, however - too realistic dialogue can often result in boring conversations, but overly flowery and poetic language can obfuscate and annoy, and in this particular book, it seems out of place. The key is to write about important things in a way that people actually speak, and not let the poet in the author run away with the characters.

That all having been said, I did enjoy the book overall, or, more accurately, I can see the appeal that the book would have to many people. In fact, I did recommend the book to my father and he is greatly enjoying it so far. Perhaps it's not the book for me, but then, I feel the same way about Pride and Prejudice.

For some reason i couldn't get too engaged with this book. It wasn't that i wasn't really too interested in the topics or couldn't understand parts, it was just not clicking for me so i had a hard time reading this book. I think it was because we had such a long time to read it so i started it strong and then put it down but not sure. Overall i thought it was pretty well written and i liked how you pretty much knew that the englishmens boy was actually the old man but you aren't sure. It was something that you had in the back of your head since page 50 but just wasn't proven.

I'm not too sure why, but I don't think I really enjoyed this book. I didn't really care about the characters much, there's something about most of them that simply bothered me, the majority of the characters seemed pretty heartless and unwilling to make any effort to change what's gonig on... the only one I actually enjoyed was Wylie, he's pretty amusing. Though, I did like the two stories discusses simultaneously, and the connection revealed between the two at the end (even though you figure it out shortly into the book).

well its finally the end of the semester and i just finished this book sadly.. put it to the end. at first i had a hard time getting into the book.. but in the middle i found to be enjoying it more. i really like the "friendship" harry and shorty developed and the way harry stood up for shorty in the end. the way harry walked away from chance i really admired. but i still was kind of confused about who shot chance. i was reading it pretty fast so i guess i missed that whole part..

well its finally the end of the semester and i just finished this book sadly.. put it to the end. at first i had a hard time getting into the book.. but in the middle i found to be enjoying it more. i really like the "friendship" harry and shorty developed and the way harry stood up for shorty in the end. the way harry walked away from chance i really admired. but i still was kind of confused about who shot chance. i was reading it pretty fast so i guess i missed that whole part..

This was one of my favorite books in this class. I loved the character of Shorty , he was like the old, crusty Grandpa I always wanted. It was interesting to me to think about cowboys in Hollywood in the 1920's, in my head I had always placed them in the 1890's, turn of the century era. Like Reuben, I also really liked the pace of the novel, there was no lagging and it kept my attention very well with the two intertwining stories. I liked how the theme of legacy v. history applied to so many characters in the book, especially those who were so different from each other, like Shorty and Chance. Harry, while being our narrator, was the most inactive of all the characters. Besides Shorty, my favorite character was Rachel, who was interestingly the only real female character in the book. It was nice to see such a strong independent woman taking control of her own life in the time when women had just been given the right to vote.

I have to be honest, I hated this novel. It was annoying how the novel kept switching stories back and forth. I was never able to connect with either of these stories. Also, I didnt like the whole western aspect of the novel. Ever since I was little my grandfather has always made me watch all the old westerns and I hate them. Reading this novel was like being forced to sit and watch the western channel marathon. I understood all the important themes in the novel, I just didn't enjoy this novel.

I didn't really like this book. Maybe it was just the shocking difference between The Handmaid's Tale and this, or simply that I don't like the style. I did enjoy the theme of Hollywood that followed through the story, but I just couldn't find myself getting into the Western parts of the novel. I found myself reading really fast, or skimming to get back to the Hollywood stuff. It was an interesting read, I just feel that I couldn't quite connect with it as much as some of the other novels we've read.

As people might recall, I "slogged" through this book and didn't enjoy it too much. I think the shock of style was the big problem for me after Atwood's elegance and the female narration.

What I did realize after the fact, however, was that it was really well written. I had a great time writing an essay about "history" comparing THe Englishman's Boy and the Handmaid's Tale. I came ot really appreciate both sections of the book though I was always more partial to Harry's/Hollywood.

I think my favourite part was the beginning and the end of Harry's stories, and the native narrative that enclosed them. Something about the river and Saskatoon- I really would have loved to read more stuff written in that way.

This book ties in to some of the others we read in terms of themes about truth and history, and I thought that was really interesting. I never really thought about that before. I think we tend to take what our history books tell us for granted, and even more disturbingly, what the movies tell us. I think we all get these schemas about different time periods or cultures or races from the media, and then we just accept that as reality. We all have an idea of what the West was like, or what Indian culture was like, and all sorts of other concepts - but how close are they to reality? I like how several of the books we've read have questioned the idea of truth and objectivity.

I also thought that this book was well written, but unlike some of my other classmembers, I did not have any trouble getting into this book. Like The Handmaid's Tale, I enjoyed going back and reexamining the authenticity of the characters when I was writing my essay. The part of the book that was most interesting was the story of 'the englishman's boy' (Shorty). History is (or should be)such an important aspect of our society, and yet we tend to not to question what we learn, or,even worse, sugar coat it to protect ourselves. I was glad that this novel focused on such issues as history and truth and that we were able to discuss them in class.

Of all the books we read this semester, I definantly found this the toughest to get through. I'm not exactly sure why, but I agree with others who say that this novel presented such a stylistic difference from the handmaids tale that it wasn't as easy to become fully enveloped in the narrative. Having discussed the subject of history as it is portrayed in the novel, however, I have gained a new appreciation for the themes and ideas presented. I also agree with many others who found the Hollywood sections a lot more interesting then the Western narrative.

i'll be honest, the parts of this book that appealed to me most were the cowboy chapters, the story of the Englishman's boy, Shorty McAdoo.
i think i had a hard time with the Hollywood chapters because of Harry. there was something about his character that didn't really appeal to me. He seemed so weak, unsure. i appreciated the descriptions of that early Hollywood and the politics and characters of the time, but beyond that, there wasn't much else in these sections that appealed to me.
maybe it was just the mood i was in during the time we read that book. maybe i had just wanted a book that moved me along. maybe i just wanted action, shoot-em-up, horse riding, swearing, bullying. the Shorty McAdoo chapters certainly did move along pretty fast, and there was always something exciting going on
i know that there was more to this book than the cowboy scenes, but those were the main things that interested me, that grabbed my attention.

I really enjoyed this book sometimes. I dragged at points, but especially like the way that it portrays the concept of how history is created by the perspective which it is told. There is Shorty's account, the brutality of inhumanity of the event, versus what becomes the film version, the New World epic of manifest destiny in action. The light in which it shows the borders of nations as arbitrary lines on a map, from the native perspective was also intriguing. It wasn't exactly plot driven, though the scenes of tragedy, the incident at the core of the novel was extremely moving.

I didn't really enjoy this book and I had an incredibly hard time finishing it. I was able to read quickly and get into it when it was the Hollywood parts but then when I was enjoying it, it would change to the old Western part and I didn't like those parts at all. They were too cliche of the "Old Western" movies and I often found myself making fun of what was said and what was going on.

One of the things that struck me about this novel was the irony of Ira's apparent need to create a great american movie from a Canadian history event,which leads into the concept of hollywood creating its own history, from legitimate truth.

I am in Grade 12 and i really couldn't get into this book b/c of the switching b/w hollywood and the cypress hills. but over all it was a good book

I just finished reading this book and now I have to do a big essay on it. Not going well. It's such a different book than what I am used to reading, and I found it really difficult to read. Not only was the narraration and atrocious amount of detail boring, but the two stories don't connect as obviously as I would hope. I could kind of see some comparisons occasionally, but it wasn't in my face, you know? I only got at the end of the book that the Englishman's boy might be Shorty Mcadoo. Rachel was by far my favorite character because she was the only one that actually had personality and was interesting. I hoped that she and Harry would hook up. But alas, Harry ditched Hollywood in the end. I was happy with that.