The Appointment: The Tale of Adaline Carson

The action of this novel takes place in the West, but it is not a “Western”; and though its central focus is the life of Adaline Carson, daughter of the famed frontiersman Kit Carson, it is also not a biography. Set in the time of the California gold rush, it is a detailed and graphic elegy for America’s wide-open plains, rivers, and mountains and the people who lived in and passed through them, for both good and ill. The Appointment is a clear-eyed vision of how greed, love, frontier mastery and the beset Native tribes contended for control of this stupendous immensity, and how one young woman and her father were taken up in the resulting maelstrom that has become our history.

John Keeble is the author of seven previous books, including Yellowfish, Broken Ground, and The Shadows of Owls. He is also author of Out of the Channel, the definitive study of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Keeble was cofounder of the graduate creative writing program at Eastern Washington University where he taught for more than thirty years, and has taught also at Grinnell College and the University of Alabama and served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University. With his wife Claire, he lives, in a house of his own construction, on a wooded hillside west of Spokane, Washington.