Shane is a short and fast-paced story set in the days of American colonization. It starts with a boy named Bob who sees a mysterious man near his house. His name was Shane, and he was friendly with Bob’s family and bonded with them. They let him stay with them, and although he was only going to stay with them for a few days, it ended up becoming months.
There was conflict arising. Fletcher, a big farmer, wants to take all the homesteaders' land, which Joe, Bob's dad, is the "leader" of. The homesteaders are resisting, but it's getting hard. Fletcher sends people to annoy and mock Shane and the other homesteaders. He keeps sending them to especially annoy Shane, because he knows that if he succeeds in driving Shane away from the town, the homesteaders will get demotivated and he will find a way to get their land. Shane gets into many conflicts with Fletcher and his men. Things get more and more intense, and guns are brought out. When something fatal happens to a homesteader, and Joe is offered a job by Fletcher, he is put in a major dilemma. Either choice would change his life drastically.
But then Shane intervenes to stop his dilemma. He did something extreme that would change everything forever for the homesteaders. Then, just as mysteriously as he came in, he left the town and rode away into the night, as he couldn’t stay with everyone knowing what he had done. The homesteaders lived happily ever after.
I thought this book was interesting. It was first-person from the viewpoint of Bob, and the author described everything so well that I felt that I was in the story. Shane was depicted as reserved but bit by bit, Bob pieced together who Shane really was and who he had been before he came to the town. I thought that this was creative that Jack Schaefer had it a mystery of who Shane was and described how Bob found out.
I would recommend Shane to anyone who likes cowboy stories set in the old west and also likes fast-paced stories.