4.5 stars

I don’t have much experience with westerns, but this one was a great read. I didn’t realize until I was almost to the end of the book that Nat Love was a real person who has been the subject of other books, and film too. This book won the 2016 Spur award for best historical western, and the fact that other historical figures, like Wild Bill Hickok and Al Swearengen, were in it should have clued me in sooner about Nat Love.
Lansdale writes across genres and has won awards for mystery and horror too, so I was excited to see what he’d do with a western. The book is written in the first person, and Nat Love’s voice is wonderful. Given the number of horrible things that happen in the book, it’s surprising how much humor there is, thanks to Nat’s deadpan observations and some great dialogue. I did a lot of highlighting.
Since the novel was written from the point of view of an African American cowboy and was set shortly after the Civil War, it had an extra layer of historical interest and emotional punch. Nat experiences racism from all quarters, including friends. He powers through life, fighting most of the way.
There was a lot of manly talk in this book, and I loved it. I wasn’t so much a fan of how crude it often got. Give me a waterfall of profanity and violence, I don’t bat an eyelash: give me bathroom talk, and I get the vapors. I disliked that aspect enough, along with one other plot point, Win’s rape and the aftermath that I almost knocked the rating down to 4 stars. After reading through everything I highlighted, I decided on my 4.5 copout.
I read this for school because I needed to pick a western this week. I’m glad I picked this one.
( )

I almost always love Landsdale's writing and his character work. This work is no exception. This is my first foray into a full western book, and I was quite pleased by the novel. I would recommend it to a friend, if I knew they enjoyed this genre. Definitely worthy of the time it takes to read it. ( )

This is an OUTSTANDING western novel about the life of Deadwood Dick, aka Nat Love.

Willie is an African American boy who was forced out on his own at a very young age, due to an unfortunate glance at the rear end of a white man's wife. This story follows Willie until he becomes Nat and, indeed, a far different man.

This audio book has it all. The narrator, Brad Sanders, is unbelievably fantastic. His performance, combined with the storytelling of Joe Lansdale, makes this one of the best audio books I've EVER read. I laughed out loud so many times my coworkers wondered what was going on. And that reaction was nothing to what happened when I began crying my eyes out later on.

I just started getting into Joe Lansdale's work this year and, again, I'm feeling sorry that I waited such a long time to do so. But on the bright side, I have a bunch more of his books to read and that's a great thing.

Highly recommended to everyone! Period. ( )

“Paradise Sky” might be the perfect title for a different kind of novel. The title may be suggestive of the west, which is where, at sunset, we find paradise in the sky, but it hardly suggests an expansive western saga of the type we find in novels with titles like “Little Big Man,” “Wild Times” and “The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.” Yet that is what Joe R. Lansdale gives us in his endlessly entertaining 2015 novel.

This is a highly fictionalized retelling of the life of Nat Love, or Deadwood Dick, although some would say Love's original telling of his story in his autobiography was itself highly fictionalized. Wherever the truth lies, Lansdale's version makes fine reading.

There were plenty of black cowboys in the Old West, but only Nate Love became a western legend. An expert horseman and marksman, he associated frequently with other, more prominent western legends. In the novel he is a close friend of Wild Bill Hickok. In his own account Love knew such men as Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid.

The son of freed slaves, Love is still in his early teens when a white man named Ruggert catches him looking at his wife's backside. From then on Ruggert proves willing to ruin his own life to end Love's, and the chase covers many years and a lot of western territory. A story that begins with Ruggert chasing Love ends with Love, by now a Judge Parker deputy, chasing the outlaw Ruggert.

In between there are shooting matches, gunfights, Indian battles, love stories and, always, witty storytelling.

Lansdale has written some terrific novels, and “Paradise Sky” ranks high among them. With a different title, more people might have read it. ( )

My review written here at New York Journal of Books: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/paradise-sky ( )