The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

Starred review from October 15, 2018
A rendering of Teddy Roosevelt's early life that spotlights formative moments in colorful, entertaining episodes.The young boy saw a werewolf near his bed at night when an asthma attack came on. As Teddy narrates, his father would order up "the Roosevelt high phaeton with its pair of long-tailed horses" and let the wind fill Teddy's lungs in thrilling rides on the "scorched plains of Manhattan's Upper West Side." He was the youngest man in the state Assembly, where he says he wore "a pince-nez with a gold tassel, and a peacoat from my Harvard days." When he lost his mother and wife within hours of each other, he fled west, to Dakota territory, "with silver stirrups, a tailored buckskin suit, and a Bowie knife from Tiffany's." But he's pulled back to New York, where he becomes a police commissioner fiercely disliked for his blue laws and anti-corruption drive. He's rescued from a melee at the Social Reform Club by his new squad of bicycle cops, whose leader will join him in Cuba. Before Charyn (Jerzy, 2017, etc.) ends with President William McKinley's assassination, he gives the Rough Riders a big slice of the book not just for TR's famous hill charge, but for the reluctant leader who could scrounge for his troops and suffer whatever the men suffered--though he also had a tent from Abercrombie & Fitch. The prolific Charyn has written scripts for graphic books. With TR, there's a sense of the outsize characters of 19th-century dime novels, though without the hagiography. Roosevelt embodied contradictions--a privileged reformist, a cowpoke from Manhattan, an honest politician--and his private life was riddled by strife and loss.Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction's panache to capture the man before he became one of the great U.S. presidents and a face on Mount Rushmore.

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November 1, 2018

Charyn ("Isaac Sidel" series) deftly employs the literary conceits of the dime novel with this rip-roaring tale of adventure and romance. Readers take a roller-coaster ride through the amazing life of Theodore Roosevelt, from his childhood escapades on the streets of Manhattan with his father, Brave Heart, to his heroic charge up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, to his assumption of the presidency following the death of William McKinley in 1901. Teddy is the hero of this story, living up to the nickname of "Sinbad" affectionately bestowed on him by his wife, Edith. He is not only a one-man cyclone blowing through the political circus of his time but a champion of the environment, an adoring husband and father, and the beloved master of regimental mascot cougar Josephine. Charyn's Roosevelt is far from two-dimensional; a man whose compassion and concern for the less fortunate informed his daring deeds. VERDICT Lovers of biographical historical fiction, especially fans of Roosevelt, will enjoy this novel peopled by real-life heroes and villains.--Barbara Clark-Greene, Westerly, RI

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2018
Charyn, whose literary ventriloquist acts include such diverse voices as Jerzy Kosinski, Abraham Lincoln, and Emily Dickinson, here tackles the twenty-sixth president of the U.S.?everything leading up to his presidency, that is. It's a picaresque novel, but then T. R. (or Teedie, as his parents called him) led a picaresque life, marked from beginning to end by restlessness and adventure. In a bluff narrative voice (and noting his subject's high-pitched speaking tone), Charyn gallops through Roosevelt's time as New York state assemblyman, North Dakota rancher and deputy sheriff, civil-service commissioner, police commissioner, lieutenant colonel of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and governor of New York. The momentum is both the novel's strength and flaw. It's a ripping, enjoyable yarn, yet one senses a struggle to add heft and significance; passages about dreadful visions and regrets don't completely cohere into a fully realized character. Perhaps it's impossible to reinvent Roosevelt as Charyn did with Emily Dickinson in his remarkable The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010)?but this is a bully read, regardless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)