Janie
by Kendall Roberts
Genre: Science Fiction / Western
ISBN: 9798891320017
Print Length: 232 pages
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner
The sequel to his thrilling Western debut, Kendall Roberts’ Janie takes on a more ruminative tone to explore the complications of lost love and difficult relationships in a speculative and magical Wild West.
While Kendall Roberts’ Gunslingers focused on Finn and Will, bereft orphans bent on revenge, Janie explores the aftershocks of that same vengeance. The book begins with a showdown in the town of Victory, a final gun battle in which Janie’s lover Will is murdered.
Lost to grief and separated from her other former companions-in-retribution (Finn and David McPhail), Janie searches for a way to reconnect with her lost love. Though Janie’s journey is far from peaceful, the foes she faces are not as physical or violent as the army of Governor Hogg’s Agents she and her friends once gunned down. Now Janie must choose between love and loss in a magical world filled with alternate realities.
With Will dead, Janie finds herself falling in with strange allies to avenge him and, ultimately, bring him back. Thwarted in her attempt to assassinate Governor Hogg, the man who originally called for the murder of Janie and her friends, Hogg grants her access to a room of portals leading to alternate worlds, worlds in which they believe she will find Will alive. However, Hogg’s help isn’t selfless and Janie must escape from his clutches as the Governor seeks to use Janie to utilize the power of those portals. Teaming up with Bidziil and Klah, two Native American mystics, Janie must dodge Hogg and his Agents and find a passage between her and the living Will’s separate dimensions.
Janie is a quiet novel, ratcheted tight with tension—a different pace from the shoot-em-up style of Gunslingers. Whether that tension is a creepy Agent who follows Janie through Hogg’s portal room or a complicated love triangle, Janie’s journey is rife with life-or-death decisions that can no longer be solved with the squeeze of a trigger. In order to keep her otherworld Will alive, Janie must find a way to guide him while also shaking the Agents on her own tail, a task that proves evermore difficult as her enemies multiply.
At the same time that Janie fights to ensure her and Will’s safety, Dick Warren, a former Ranger-turned-Agent, wrestles with his own allegiances, preferring peace to violence. While it would be easy for Roberts to write a book about good conquering evil, he complicates the narrative of black hats and white hats as Warren and even Governor Hogg are portrayed not as pure evil, but as complex and misinformed men acting on good intent.
Roberts also questions gender and sexuality in his multifaceted Western as characters challenge antiquated tradition. For a time, Janie works with a community of formerly abused women who have rejected the male rule of the West, pitting them against the Agents who seek to uphold old-fashioned binaries. With complex characters and insight, Roberts successfully explores the gray areas of the classic Western.
As the sequel to the already progressive take on the Western that is Gunslingers, Janie takes up the torch to show how the most important battles are often fought without bullets and knives. They are fought with words, with hope, with perseverance to keep riding, keep chasing after true love. They are battles fought within, and often against, oneself. Janie’s battles are battles that only she can win, and it’s definitely worth reading to find out whether or not she can survive them.
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