Month: May 2021

“This novel and its trio of teenagers surprised me over and over again. Prodigies is a rip-roaring, unexpected, funny, and utterly original escape.”

• Angie Abdou (This One Wild Life, In Case I Go)

“Winnipeg based author Bob Armstrong has written an engaging Western novel with crossover appeal to young adult audiences. Set in 1870s New York and Midwest America, Prodigies grips readers tight and holds on right to the end. … The novel’s explosive conclusion could certainly launch a sequel as our prodigies (now friends) dust off and continue their journeys.”

• Anita Daher (You Don’t Have to Die in the End)

I began considering my forthcoming novel, Prodigies, after a trip to the old Arizona mining boomtown of Jerome in 2010. By 2015, I was well into a first draft of Prodigies, by this point set in Deadwood and various points east.

In the last decade, I’ve read plenty of fiction and non-fiction set along the North American frontier between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Recently, I thought about some differences and similarities between Canadian and American literary treatments of frontier themes and settings. The result was this essay in the June 2021 issue of The Literary Review of Canada. https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2021/06/writing-into-the-sunset/