posted on 31 Mar 2019

One Shot by Tanya Landman

For those of us who have grown up in the UK, the American West at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century is something we see largely through the lens of popular television programmes or films. And, until recently, that has tended to be a picture that was rather soft focus (The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie etc.) or dominated by a narrative of brave white settlers overcoming marauding savage Indians. Thankfully, these historical myths are now being properly confronted by authors who want to write books that set the record straight and represent history in fiction with a little more fidelity.

Tanya Landman is an author who is doing exactly that for a young adult audience and in One Shot she returns to the sometimes grim realities of American pioneer life to tell the story of Maggie and her family. Maggie’s life from a very young age is tough but she is, at least comforted by the love of her father. When one day he gets caught in a blizzard and freezes to death on the wagon he was driving, Maggie’s life falls apart and not least because the cold that killed her father has entered her mother’s soul too.

Maggie’s father had encouraged her to shoot his old rifle and at only 8 years of age she’s already a crack shot – it’s a natural talent, the sort that can’t be taught. But for her mother all this is a sin and an unnatural thing for a young girl to be doing and – maybe as her way at dealing with the grief of the loss of her husband – she turns on Maggie and incarcerates her in what we’d now think of as a residential care home.

This is the start of a terrible few years of exploitation and abuse until her natural resilience and her unquenchable spirit pull her through.

I’m deliberately not saying how the story develops and unfolds because it’s brilliantly told by Tanya Landman and you won’t want the plot of this page turner revealed in advance. The book is written as a first person narrative, grabs you from the very outset with a pacey opening and just never lets you go – despite the fact that there’s plenty of grim real-life detail here. But Landsman is a skilful enough writer to know how far she can go and we’re never pushed over the cliff-edge of despair because Maggie herself never allows that to happen.

Maggie’s story is loosely based on the real life biography of Annie Oakley who gained fame as a sharpshooter in the famous Buffalo Bill Wild West Show that toured Britain and Europe in the first years of the 20th century. The author gives us a brief pen portrait of Annie Oakley at the end but is firm in the telling us that whilst Oakley’s life was an inspiration, this is not her biography.

The book is published by Barrington Stoke in their ‘super readable’ series and is guided for readers of 9+ but this may be a book better aimed at slightly older children – it’s a decision I suspect you’d need to make based on the maturity of the young reader.

This is highly recommended.

 

Terry Potter

April 2019