Cuba Libre, by Elmore Leonard

The Skinny

Score: 81%

Only an author with Leonard's experience could have pulled this off. Using his modern crowd-pleasing style, he blends a rootin', tootin' Western with a stuffy historical novel to extract the best from both worlds.


The Meat:

Cuba Libre represents a masterful handling of a middling genre. Leonard breathes life into a fascinating historical period (Cuba, 1989), but this isn't historical fiction in the literary sense.

Rather, this is a pulse-pounding modern suspense novel transposed into an authentic, western-friendly setting. The character development is significant and neatly woven into the text, but all aspects of the story are subservient to fast-paced action and crowd-pleasing plot twists.

Expect to meet heroic bandits and the requisite "hooker with a heart of gold." In this case, they have just enough of a scruffy exterior to be interesting.

People who like historical fiction may be pleasantly surprised by the way this book zips along, running us through a variety of historical settings and events at a breakneck pace. I would also recommend this to those who enjoy a good yarn-- fans of Louis Lamour or even Thomas Harris might find that this book injects that type of story with a little bit of weight.

The Fat:

$7.50 for the paperback new, or 1 penny:

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