Hansen’s keen eye for critical detail and talent for compelling period dialogue have won him quite a following, and he will not disappoint readers with The Kid ... Hansen is as bold in his masterful writing as was his young protagonist in his daring gunplay. The result is a marvelous journey into both history and imagination, in which the author’s command of historical sources, landscape, period dialogue and the details of everyday life combine into a perfectly compelling and fast-paced story.
A skilled researcher, Hansen anchors his book in the dark waters of character. The Kid’s story has been told many times. But not like this ... The real achievement of this novel is its pesky style. Like the Kid, Hansen revels in the lingo of tabloid and tale, of dime novel and detective story. He also highlights the haphazard nature of our fates.
The Kid is narrated with a wry voice capable of turning a nice phrase ... Hansen’s research is admirably thorough. His narrator, however, rarely allows Billy or anyone else to be revealed through thought, emotion, words or action...Soon, the novel becomes akin to reading a census ... And that is this novel’s central problem: These named persons cannot properly be considered characters. Some are initially given a short biography and physical description, but none is fully realized. The narrator just won’t get out of their way.
Guns were aimed at him and he shot back. This at least is how Mr. Hansen tells the story; and he does so persuasively ... without excessively palliating the Kid’s crimes, Mr. Hansen has you wondering how this intelligent and likeable young man might have turned out with better guidance in a different environment ... The Kid is a Romance, for all its documentary-style realism. But why not? The Western remains something uniquely American, a myth gone global. The real Kid may have been nastier than this figure from Romance, but so what? This is the West, and as the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has it, 'when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' Which is what Mr. Hansen has done, very enjoyably.
...may be the definitive book on Billy the Kid, the elusive character from America’s Old West ... Taking a definitive approach that plows under historical quibbles allows Hansen to add detail and dialogue to the story, character and wit to Billy — even intimate love scenes ... As Hansen says at the end of his book, the Kid has become 'to a great degree each person’s wild invention.' This is Hansen’s version — a wisecracking daredevil.
With The Kid, Hansen clearly aims to rely on the same design used for The Assassination of Jesse James, creating a tapestry of lyrical description, indelible images of both beauty and cruelty, and details gleaned from assiduous research ... Throughout, while the largely inaccurate legend of his ruthlessness grows, he demonstrates himself to be sensitive as well as well-spoken - not only in Hansen's imagination, but also in the letters Billy wrote to others, from which Hansen quotes occasionally, to great effect. Nevertheless, though Hansen's corrective portrait is illuminating, the novel itself, in the end, falters. Bogged down by too much historically accurate but extraneous matter, The Kid frequently sacrifices narrative momentum for the sake of pursuing seemingly every possible tangent along the way.
Hansen's Billy is a shiftless if well-meaning lad who constantly finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, up to the very end of his short life. The book's strengths include a glossary of its many characters, which helps sort Billy's friends from his foes, and Hansen's own vivid and engaging narrative based on his careful reading of the historical record.
