The Renegades: Rafe
Grade : F

I've heard a lot of buzz over a movie in which a man has a condition that renders him unable to remember anything for longer than 10 minutes. The movie is called Memento, and I'm told it's thrilling. In The Renegades: Rafe, none of the characters can hold on to a thought or behave in a manner consistent with their backgrounds for longer than 10 pages. I'll tell you, it's tedious.

He is Rafe, a half-Choctaw, half-Louisiana patrician, wrenched from his mother's tribe to be raised in high society, leaving the woman he loves to go spy for the South in Texas (or something...I couldn't quite follow this part.) He spends time in a Mexican jail, fathers a son with a Mexican woman, and becomes a fabulously successful professional gambler.

She is Maddie, who refused to abandon her ailing father as New Orleans burned around them, later dragged by a faithless husband to San Antonio, where she writes and publishes the newspaper that her husband loses in a card game to a gambler who is none other than Rafe, the very man she refused to run away with and had given up for dead a decade ago.

Doesn't that sound exciting? Ah, what might have been.

Instead, all of that action, more than enough to fill a book, happens almost entirely off-camera in the first 50 pages. There's more plot after that, but it's all pretty much in the same vein. Having won Maddie's newspaper in a bet, Rafe gives Maddie the chance to win it back if she can turn a profit in three years. Then neither of them ever thinks of it again, except for passing moments when they need something to bicker about. The bet, like Rafe's Choctaw/patrician heritage, his years as a spy or something, his son's Mexican ancestry, Maddie's father, husband, profession, and reputation, surfaces only to stir up conflict or give a push to the plot. None of these situations is integrated into the story in a remotely believable, consistent way. The pacing is poor and the story lacks focus. After cramming a decade of action into 50 pages, another 50 are devoted to a pie auction and picnic. The story would have been better served to choose, say, three elements - maybe Maddie's labors to save her newspaper, Rafe's efforts to become a better father, and his son's experiences with local racism - and really focus on them. Instead the story shuffles about twenty different potential plot threads and does full service to none of them.

The characters have all the depth and reflection of an oil slick on a mud puddle. Maddie has no personality to speak of and Rafe is a real piece of work, still furious after ten years that Maddie wouldn't abandon her dying father for him, that she had the gall to believe multiple independent reports of his death, and that she married after only a year and a half of deep mourning. They never think about what they're doing, or where they've been; they just fume over how they can never reveal their true feelings to one another. Time spent seeing the world through this pair's eyes is time wasted.

This author has received more favorable reviews at AAR in the past; this installment appears to have expanded all of the problems and mislaid all of the charms of the rest of the series. Here's hoping for better success in another outing.

Reviewed by Mary Novak
Grade : F

Sensuality: Subtle

Review Date : November 10, 2001

Publication Date: 2001

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