BOOK REVIEW: True Grit by Charles Portis ★★★★☆

On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is shot dead by Tom Chaney, one of his own workers, for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. When Ross's unusually single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie arrives to claim his body, she discovers that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into a dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down and avenge her father's murder.

After reading my first western novel, Jack Martin’s The Tarnished Star, this 1952 novel was sure to come. After watching both the new film version (Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfield) and the old (starring John Wayne, Glen Campbell and Kim Darby) I needed to read the book.

To have True Grit, you have to be someone who harbours courage, resilience and determination in life and ideology. And this comes in a form of a fourteen-year-old girl, Mattie Ross, who not only is the main protagonist, but a sincere role model to all young girls to possess the main titles attribute. Written in the first person and set in 1870’s west-central Arkansas, Dardanelle, Yell County, this powerful yet simple story of revenge to catch Tom Chaney, the man who shot, killed and robbed Mattie’s father Frank Ross. But she can’t do it alone and seeks the assistance of a one-eyed drunken US Marshall Rueben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn and a Texas Ranger LaBoeuf.

I think it is refreshing to read a western not from a man’s perspective. It’s a good book, with a great storyline. As Mattie states in the first chapter, not many people would give credit to a 14-year-old catching her father’s killer, but to me she was exceptional. We all assume that it’s Cogburn who possess true grit, after all, it was Mattie who seeks him out to help her catch her father’s killer. But all along it was Mattie herself who possessed true grit, with her determination to ‘see the thing done’.

In addition, I just loved the realism of it. Mattie isn’t the type of person to think that catching Chaney would be easy and everyone gets what they want. In fact, the journey to find Chaney is long, full of aching horseback rides, camping at night and finding food to eat. Not to mention Cogburn’s repetitive slurs and LaBeouf constant talk of Texas justice.

As much as I adored the character and plot, the only negative thing I would probably say is that I read ‘said’ everywhere. I couldn’t imagine that the line would be delivered without expression so a few said synonyms wouldn’t have hurt. Sometimes I do find that first-person narrative stories do tend to ramble on a bit and I did find that Mattie did that too. And I personally don’t know if the story would be as effective if it was in 3rd person.

All in all, True Grit is a fantastic book and I highly recommend this for all western genre lovers. It’s a must read and a great book for our time.

Rating 4.5/5
Publishers: Bloomsbury UK
First Published: May 21st 1952
Second Publication: January 2011
Genre: Western/ Historical Fiction