What did you love best about Noose Jumpers?
I liked the diversity of the characters. Cooley has a way of making you relate to every character in the novel.
What did you like best about this story?
The suspense in figuring out what game was actually being played here.
What does Andrew Tell bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Andrew Tell is very good at distinguishing between many different characters. Having only heard him 8 other books of one series, there were a couple time where I was confused as a bit character in this novel was briefly in my mind the sentient ax from that series. It happened one other time too, but with the total number of characters in both series, it is amazing that there weren’t more collisions..
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I’ve heard people had avoided this book because it was a western. I’m not positive it is a western any more than Firefly is a western. I avoided it because I made assumptions about what “Noose Jumpers” meant and I was completely wrong. I ended up finishing this book before I completed Sue Grafton’s long awaited “Y is for Yesterday” because Noose Jumpers drew me in deeper into its world.
Any additional comments?
A fun book with a good story. A book I read in spite of the title.

I’m glad I took a chance on “Noose Jumpers”. With the book not initially taking off in sales as expected, Cooley once said “if you have come to trust my writing through my other books please give it a chance”. I’m glad I did. My first impressions based upon the cover alone were pretty much all wrong.

The title and the short film seemed to place it firmly in the camp of novels with “Gods” popping in and out of the story with no real system of magic or limit to it. This is not that.

I also expected some super naturally twist where people were killed all the time by hanging and were teleported out of their executioners noose to be berated by some god and sent back again to give you the “noose jumping”. This is also not that.

In fact the term Noose Jumpers is barely mentioned and never explained till the afterword – which in my opinion should have gone first. A one paragraph note explaining the title in the book blurb would have had me purchasing this book earlier (and not on sale).

Since it isn’t in the story at all and is declared elsewhere by Cooley as an enticement to read the book, let me explain what a noose jumper is. (BTW I am super sensitive to spoilers and this does not qualify, imho, but this extra sentence gives you a chance to stop reading the review if you really really want to.) The title comes from the idea that just as a bungee jumper seeks thrills and dangers, there once was a breed of character in the old west that thought the thrill of running up a bounty and risking getting caught and hung. The greater the effort to grow your a legend and bounty, the greater the thrill of escaping the noose. It was nothing more than that. So much for guessing the entire plot of the book based upon the title!

The book tells is the story of three friends who hoped to grow their legends and some undisclosed (even to each other) help they found along the way. It’s a fantasy wild west novel. There is a magic system involved. There’s humor. There’s high adventure.

I am tempted to compare the book to others even though I hate that method of writing reviews. Each person gets their own sense of a book and comparing any book to another risks misleading someone and it is unfair to the author. I will say that there are some elements of whimsy that you’d get a Terry Pratchett book just as there is the companionship you’d get from a Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman Dragonlance book. And perhaps there is some befuddlement you’d get from a Terry Brooks novel Magic Kingdom. Ah, yes, there’s what I was looking for. There was a good bit of a Terry Brooks Landover series feel to the book to me. Funny how I picked all fantasy writers for comparison with a western..