Mary Doria Russell

A sequel to Doc is based on the true events of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Wyatt Earp's survival against a backdrop of volatile politics in 1881 America. By the award-winning author of The Sparrow. 50,000 first printing.

A Novel of the O.K. Corral

Epitaph

Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Tombstone, Arizona, and to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands. . . . That was America in 1881. All those forces came to bear on the afternoon of October 26 when Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor arrest. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three officers were wounded and three citizens lay dead in the dirt. Wyatt Earp was the last man standing, the only one unscathed. The lies began before the smoke cleared, but the gunfight at the O.K. Corral would soon become central to American beliefs about the Old West. Epitaph tells Wyatt’s real story, unearthing the Homeric tragedy buried under 130 years of mythology, misrepresentation, and sheer indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, this novel gives voice to the real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty seconds in Tombstone. At its heart is the woman behind the myth: Josephine Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for forty-nine years and who carefully chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic legend that would become the epitaph her husband deserved.

altlovesbooks

I was vaguely dissatisfied with this book, for reasons I can't clearly define. I read (well, listened) to this one immediately after I gave Doc a glowing 5 star/favorite review. I was itching to get back to the characters that had been so carefully profiled, and get to know new ones in Tombstone as we did in Dodge City. Doc made me feel things; unfortunately, all I felt after finishing Epitaph was an inability to put my finger on exactly why I was disappointed.

For one thing, I feel like this book lacked a soul, or a purpose. Doc, while slow and not really focused on action, did a stellar job of making you feel really attached to its cast, and you felt things when they felt things. Epitaph flipped the script a little because of its focus on Tombstone and the OK Corral and focused more on action than characters. I get that it's an important segment of history, but I was there for the character development I saw in Doc, and I didn't feel that here. There was a lot going on in this book, and I feel like not all of it was done well, and I felt vaguely distracted and bored when it got too far into the weeds of lawman politics (as it does for large chunks of the book). 

For another, I also feel like the ending was weak. With 10% to go, even the author said "If you want a storybook ending, stop—now—and remember them in that tender moment", as if even the author knew that the book was going to go places that you probably didn't sign up for. I found myself incredibly bored with the POV of the very last part of the book, and I feel like it would have been stronger to end it before then. 

I had such high hopes for this book after how much I loved Doc, but it just didn't deliver for me.

Daryl Houston

I didn't really expect to think much of this one, but I wound up liking it a lot. Russell tells the story of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday in a really engaging and I think fair (meaning, she acknowledges their imperfections) way. Sometimes the pacing was a little staccato for me when she would group a lot of rapid-fire vignettes into a single chapter, but on the whole it was easy and enjoyable to read.

Epitaph A Novel of the O.K. Corral

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