Telegraph Days

Nellie Courtright is a genuinely fun protagonist — sardonic, resourceful, and cheerfully unimpressed by the legends she keeps bumping into — and McMurtry's parodic deflation of Western mythology has real charm. But the episodic structure never coheres into something more than a picaresque string of encounters, and the thin characterization outside Nellie means the novel doesn't build the emotional weight that makes McMurtry's best work last. A breezy, entertaining read that falls well short of the bar he set with Lonesome Dove.