Bobbi's Reviews > Ride the Pink Horse

Hughes is wonderful at creating a world within a world that you can't help but become a part of, even though she paints them dark, pits them against her people. She seems to specialize in purposeful alienation, to create characters that you don't like but whom you begin to root for, almost against your will. Characters that pit themselves against the world they live in and those that people it, but for base rather than noble reasons. People you wish death and failure on but whom you also secretly cheer and mourn, for no redeeming characteristic at all.

The characters in this book, like the setting, have no great and noble reason to loom larger than life. But they do. And this should be nothing but a good piece of noir, but instead I keep thinking about hard-headed ancient explorers hurling themselves into the dangerous, alien unknown for the promise of Cibola, of the mythological figures of conqueror and conquered throughout history, of Zozobra, and a land that fights its own battles. This story is just a story, but like all good stories, it is also timeless, the repetition of an echo in the world.