The Awesome Indies Seal of Excellence for Outstanding Independent Literature has been awarded to Delivering Virtue by Brian Kindall!
From Our Awesome Indies Reviewer:
Delivering Virtue by Brian Kindall is a different kind of western story. Didier Rain, a dissolute poet is hired by an offshoot Mormon sect to deliver a bride to their Prophet Nehi in his isolated compound in northern Utah. Rain is shocked to find that the ‘bride’ is an infant named Virtue, but the prospect of a $10,000 payday causes him to accept the challenge.
From Rain’s departure the story takes many quite unexpected turns, with aspects of mysticism, fantasy, and strange glimpses of the future thrown into a hard-boiled western story of a not-so-good man’s journey of self-discovery. The author skillfully weaves the mystical elements into the story, with flashbacks into Rain’s past making them even credible.
The narrator has a notably extensive vocabulary and elegance of prose suitable for the poetic aspirations of the character, and it even includes made-up words, such as ‘spelunkulatory’. Some readers may find phrases such as “discussing business in a private glossolalia,” a little off-putting, but personally, I enjoyed the depth of vocabulary and the writing style. Luckily ereaders have inbuilt dictionary to help ascertain a word’s meaning, because it is not always clear from the context of the passages.
All up, it’s a great story, and it has a strange, but somehow satisfying ending that I won’t spoil by revealing. 5 stars.
From The Book’s Synopsis:
It’s 1854 and Didier Rain doesn’t want to be a rogue. He prefers to think of himself as a gentleman poet. And yet every time Rain finds himself in questionable circumstances, some animal instinct leads him into wrongful behavior. Maybe it’s his Oedipal upbringing that’s to blame. Or maybe he’s just never found a good moral example that hasn’t let him down. But now Rain has to put away all of his failings because The Church of the Restructured Truth has hired him to fulfill a prophecy – Didier Rain is to venture into the American Wilderness and deliver a bride into the waiting arms of the Prophet Nehi. It won’t be easy, what with all the hooligans, natural phenomena, and carnal temptations between here and there. Not to mention that Virtue – the would-be bride – is at present no more than a babe. But maybe the invisible gods will lend Rain a hand in the endeavor. Maybe Virtue is as much of an angel as she appears. And maybe, by epic journey’s end, Didier Rain will overcome the odds, experience a miracle, and find a way to secure his own dubious salvation.