I loved Devil Up by TR Pearson. What a story! It's full of colorful characters, funny, and sad in parts. TR Pearson has won my admiration for this narrative. Living in Colorado I appreciated that part of the story took place in our state. I will be buying this book for my father! Highly recommend it.

In the spring of 1879, a sixteen-year-old boy from the Virginia uplands finds himself alone on the Great Plains with a Colt Navy revolver and the family mule.

What was meant to be a frontier adventure with two of his friends has turned into a solitary ordeal as he makes his way across a sparsely settled and largely lawless piece of the world.

He’s bound for California and narrates his journey in harrowing and hilarious detail, telling the story of a farm boy from back east who becomes -- through pluck and heart and more than a little gunplay -- a man.

A can’t-put-down book!… I read late into to the night because I just had to know what the ending was going to be. Phenomenal... I could not put it down.

Amazing! Such an entertaining and easy read. I laughed out loud so many times and shed a couple tears.
The story flows so beautifully and it keeps you glued to the pages. Its about a 16yr old boy making a trip across USA on his way west to mine gold in 1800's.
What a story and exceptional writing!!

I LOVE this book! It’s a great adventure with wonderful writing and great characters. I will be reading more books by Mr. Pearson.

A nice yarn with fine characters and horses. Not too violent, not too fluffy and sunny. The main character, Silas, reminds me of Ned Little, more kind, version but rub this boy of sixteen the wrong way -and he turns into mean shootist.

Remember at the end of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck says he thinks he might "light out for the territories"? That's roughly what this book is about. I'm not comparing T. R. Pearson to Twain as a writer - I like Pearson a lot but let's not go overboard - but this is a story of a young man leaving home, confronting the ugliness of American attitudes toward race and gender, and accreting a family of blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and strong women.

Because this is Pearson, they settle into a life of violence and semi-lawlessness. There is no sentimentality: the Pawnee is anything but a noble Red Man, the "Mexican" is the intellectual of the group, the "Black" character is humorously amorphous as to how black he really is ("Octoroon" or something else?), and the Irish femme fatale has more frontier survival skills than the rest of them. Also because it is Pearson, there is a touch of the uncanny.

The narrator's voice takes us back to Huck Finn: ingenuous, perceptive, folksy, and insightful. And funny.

Highly recommended.

TR Pearson, the author of twenty-three novels under his own name, has been on my favorite list with his series of of frightening and funny Southern detective stories. Devil Up, unlike the others, is set in America - all of it - toward the end of the gold rush years and ends 70 years later. Along the way our 16 year old protagonist and his mule gather a diverse gang of misfits who take up bounty hunting to support themselves. There are whiffs of Larry McMurtry, Willie Vlautin's Lean on Pete, and more, but the mood here is more lighthearted mayhem.