Name: Tamara's review of True Grit by Charles Portis
Item: True Grit
Rating: 4
Author: Tamara

Charles Portis

Pursuing a cunning murderer who has escaped with his band deep into Indian Territory, U.S. Marshal Rooster J. Cogburn teams up with a bounty-hunting Texas Ranger and Mattie Ross, a cantankerous young lady who is bent on revenge. Reprint.

True Grit

Tamara

a novel

True grit

I’m just not a Western person. But I tried. Mattie Ross does have True Grit though.

Jess Rez

altlovesbooks

"What have you done when you have bested a fool?"

Young me, who read things like Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jurassic Park, and Magic Kingdom for Sale would have loved this book. This book has a plucky, 14-year-old female lead character, who's always got a witty comeback and a plan of action, all the things I loved as a kid. As it is, I really liked it, but it just wasn't geared towards my age group.

Mattie's father was killed before the book starts out, and we're introduced to her as she begins her quest for vengeance. In her way is a world doubly convinced that a 14 year old, let alone a 14 year old female, is incapable of going out into the wide Wild West world to track a killer and bring him to justice. The world is sorely mistaken, and has drastically underestimated Mattie's resourcefulness.

Highly recommend this to the younger teens, perhaps as young as 10 depending on maturity, particularly if they enjoy fun adventure stories. The dialogue is a little stilted and period-specific sometimes, which may be difficult for kids to read through, but it's such a fun book that I think that makes up for the forced vocabulary lesson.

rumbledethumps

Charles Portis created one of the immortal American characters in Mattie Ross. I still cannot believe I did not come across Portis earlier in my reading life.

The #1 New York Times bestselling classic frontier adventure novel that inspired two award-winning films! Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost writers. True Grit, his most famous novel, was first published in 1968, and became the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and, in 2010, a new version starring Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges and written and directed by the Coen brothers. True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father’s blood. With one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the killer into Indian Territory. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.

A Novel

Jonathan Tysick

Having watched both film adaptions, I was keen to read the book (although unfortunately John Wayne's image probably loomed too large over my imagination's display of Rooster Cogburn). I wasn't disappointed, but nor was I enthused. A solid western. Mattie Ross is a cool character and as a Christian I appreciated the seemingly random quotations of the Bible and mentions of theology.

Westerns are not really my thing but the spunky 14-year-old Mattie Ross, stone-cold avenger of her father, hooked me from the first page. Having lived several of my formative years in Arkansas also made this book resonate with me more than expected. I strongly recommend this short and masterful book to anyone fond of adventure. 

Ashlyn

Ryan LaFerney

True Grit by Charles Portis is one of the best works of American literature ever written. It's up there with the best works of Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and many other authors I adore. It's a straightforward story about a very strong-willed young girl who's determined to see her father's killer brought to justice, so she teams up with a tough drunkard of a U.S. Marshal and a Texas Ranger to find the killer, Tom Chaney, and the gang he belongs to. The unlikely trio finds danger and surprises on the journey, and each has his or her "grit" tested.

True Grit is a story worth revisiting again and again for its narrative voice. Our fierce narrator is none other than the strong-willed young girl, Mattie Ross. A western written from the eyes of a woman was truly revolutionary when this was published in the 1950s. And Mattie is such a human yet immortal character. She is up there with Huck Finn. Portis is so good at illustrating a sense of place through her voice and the voice of the other characters, that the characters seem alive and you really feel like you too are in Indian Territory. 

True Grit is also an economically written work of art. Not a word is wasted. All English majors should be made to read this. It truly is the perfect book.

Reread for the 10th time in summer 2021.

Andrew Sztehlo

In her introduction to this volume, Donna Tartt ranks True Grit as one of the great masterpieces of American literature; a coming of age novel as good as Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye. I thought that was quite the claim, but was interested to see how it would live up to it.

True Grit absolutely did. Charles Portis’ slim masterpiece is a grand classic literary western in the vein of The Virginian and Riders of the Purple Sage; however it far surpasses those classics in the quality of its prose, the sparkle of its dialogue, and the tension of its narrative.

Mattie Ross is one of the great narrators of any novel. Her story and perspective brings sharp wit and commentary to the Old West, and it is through her eyes that we see and interpret classic Western scenarios. It is her relationship with Marshal Rooster Cogburn that is the centre of the novel. Portis deconstructs and reassembles - in a much stronger fashion - the traditional gunslinger of the West. We see a figure that is far more dubious, more ethically compromised, and perhaps someone who is quite pathetic. The majesty of the novel, then, is in seeing how Rooster, despite his shortcomings, does indeed live up to the title; how he becomes a man of True Grit.

Portis both indulges the classic wonder of the West but also writes something more complex and challenging than any other classic Western novel. In some ways this feels like a bridge between the classic West of Zane Grey and Owen Wister and the revisionist, more historically accurate, and far darker westerns of Cormac McCarthy and Ron Hansen. It’s a fantastic novel and holds a lot of power for its slim size. I can not recommend this extraordinary novel enough.

Andrea Badgley

True Grit, set in Arkansas and the Oklahoma Territory in the years just after the Civil War, when Texas Rangers chased fugitives in Indian Territory and the frontier was pushing west, is the story of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl who seeks a man "with grit" to help her apprehend the man who killed her father. 

Mattie Ross is one of the most endearing female characters I have come across - not because she is sweet-natured and charming, but just the opposite: she is hard and blunt. It does not take long to figure out who in the book is the one with True Grit:

"You are impudent."
"I do not wish to be, sir, but I will not be pushed around when I am in the right."(Mattie)

"You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away." (Mattie)

I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool? (Mattie)

Before reading this book, before I even knew True Grit was a book, I watched the John Wayne movie of the same title. The movie tickled me - I loved the characters and the wandering through Indian Territory in pursuit of a murderer - but then when I read the book less than a month afterward, I heard the actor's voices when I read their lines, and I saw their faces as the characters moved through the story. The movie was very true to the book, so that wasn't necessarily a bad thing - I was delighted to see some of my favorite lines in the movie were quoted directly from Portis's pages:

"I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains." (Mattie to Rooster when he offered her whiskey)

- it's more that I'm not sure what my experience of the book would have been had I not seen the movie first. It is unusual for me to experience literature in that order: movie then book. It's usually the other way around. Either way, both stand up as everything you want from a rolicking Western tale: drunkards, bandits, campfires and horses, and frontier women with sand and true grit.

Tamara &
True Grit by Charles Portis

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Tamara &
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