Title: No Lookin’ Back: True-To-Life Western Story
Authors: Ted Riddle, Linda Riddle
Publisher: Ewings Publishing LLC
ISBN: 979–8890317469
Pages: 370
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewer: Lily Amanda
Hollywood Book Reviews
Co-authors Ted Riddle and Linda Riddle pack a punch with their stirring novel, No Lookin’ Back: True-To-Life Western Story which forms a unique tapestry of events. Through the main character, Thomas Jefferson Summers, the book explores the American Old West in the 1800s. A striking foreword offered by Linda forms the basis of the story detailing how her husband, Ted, woke up one Sunday morning speaking in a different tone and strange dialect and both realized that the chronicle had to be published.
Thomas and his brother John lived with their parents in Tennessee and had grown up being the objects of their father’s drunken and violent fits. The two join the Union army, partly to escape this, and get separated shortly after recruitment. The story puts Tom on center stage and readers move with him as he encounters numerous challenges; he narrowly escapes a leg amputation by a brutal field doctor, he is forced to venture into the uncertain Cherokee nation as he makes his way up north, evade soldiers looking for deserters like Tom, encountering dangerous snakes in the rustic wild and persevering hard rain. Eventually, he becomes a wealthy rancher and patriarch.
This was such a riveting story which carried me through various states such as: Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. Told with verve, the story is enhanced with information obtained via travels, libraries, and study, digging deep into the American folk lore. This lets you feel and imagine the expansive landscapes of America and the epic events which changed the continent – and in retrospect, greatly influenced the development of the United States.
No Lookin’ Back: a True-To-Life Western Story by Ted Riddle and Linda Riddle is an adventure waiting to unravel. Connoisseurs of historical fiction will find this enlightening and absorbing Wild West saga worth poring over.