Young Zorro: The Iron Brand [Hardcover]

Young Zorro: The Iron Brand by Jan Adkins (Harper Collins Publishers 0060839457)

The young hero, Diego de la Vega is a different from his best friend Bernardo as can possibly be, despite the fact they were raised together. Diego is a chatterbox, tall and thin, and always looking for some mischief to get into. Bernando is cautious, short and compact, and never speaks. More than once, Diego's enthusiasm for adventure pulls Bernardo along into a situation where he'd rather not be. The Iron Brand takes the two boys into the intrigue of several men who have gone missing from the pueblo of Los Angeles and solving the mystery of the missing cattle from his father's ranch, introducing him to the exciting world he will one day seek to tame. Set in early-nineteenth century Spanish California, this novel was inspired by Isabel Allende's novel. Although the book got off to a slow start because of the set-up of being told by Diego Vega, a descendant of Diego de la Vega, readers should enjoy the escapades of the two boys enough to be patient until the mystery and excitement begin.

I wrote Young Zorro, so it pains me to see a hopeful little book crippled by misconceptions.

Though I was a technical advisor to Isabel Allende when she wrote her adult novel, Zorro, my book for young people was NOT "inspired by Allende's novel." Isabel is a wonderful and charming woman I genuinely like but we're different writers. She writes about mystic powers and destiny; I write about places, people and things as they really were. Isabel felt that pueblo des Los Angeles in 1800 was a dull, barren place and hurried to get her characters off to Spain, where they could find civilized adventure. To me, the fascination was with the pueblo and the mission at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Gabrieleño Native Americans, the vaquero cattle culture, the horse-culture life of the pueblo's Californios, perched on the edge of the known world, more distant and harder to visit than old Beijing or Mumbai. The real, historical adventure that spoke to me was in the exotic, fresh grasslands and forests around the pueblo.

This book was NOT a spin-off of the Banderas Zorro movies, as entertaining and fun as they were. The primary reviewer saw this as a "quickie," hammered out to take advantage of the movie press. The movie version has almost nothing to do with Young Zorro. Young Diego and his brother Bernardo came out of the existing deep well of Zorro lore. If any movie inspired Young Zorro, it was the original silent by Douglas Fairbanks. The brilliant Fairbanks took a stiff, conventional hero-with-a-sword from a pulp magazine story by Carson Macaulay, and re-visioned him as a genial rogue, intelligent and humorous and playful. The Zorro Fairbanks created and played is an American Robin Hood with egalitarian American ideals. It escapes most readers that no trail of bodies follows this superhero. He has no special powers, only skill and stealth. He chastizes and humiliates but doesn't slay, and he does it with a light laugh. Next to most of our heroes, he's astonishingly mild.

Young Zorro WAS an honest attempt to interest boys in reading, and to interest girls in adventure tales (the character Trinity, our scrappy red-haired waterfront tomboy, is a match for the boys). It was more specifically an attempt to interest young readers in the Hispanic heritage of California and of Hispanic influence in United States history. We were hoping to make the planned Young Zorro series a part of the California curriculum, which gives special attention to the life-line of missions along the coast to Sonoma.

An error was made in giving the books its cover. Instead of citing me as the sole author, we took a flight of fantasy and made up young Vega as the narrator. The sad consequence is that "VEGA" appears on the book's spine and only two or three reviewers bothered to write a piece on this wholesome, hopeful, young adult novel. Sigh.

Jan Adkins