The Pride of Palomar

The Pride of Palomar is an elegy for a vanishing California, told through the story of a young man's return from the Great War. When Michael Joseph Farrel, Don Mike, leaves the ancestral Rancho Palomar to fight in France, he carries with him his father's legacy and the old California's fading promise. But the land that welcomes him home has grown harsh in the drought, and the quail have vanished from the hills. A telegram has already brought word of his death to the ranch. The elderly majordomo Pablo Artelan has grieved. Old Don Miguel has died. And Don Mike must now face a world that has moved on without him, carrying the weight of heritage and the quiet tragedy of changed times. Peter B. Kyne writes with tenderness and local color about a California that existed only in memory even as it was being published, a world of rancho life, of mission bells, of a frontier closing forever. For readers who loved East of Eden's California or the nostalgic novels of Wallace Stegner, this is a meditation on loss, legacy, and what we inherit when the world we knew has already passed.