JULY 2016 - AudioFile
Narrator Grover Gardner’s charming voice lends the perfect touch to Captain Jefferson Kidd, a lonely widower in 1870 Texas. Gardner smoothly portrays Kidd’s sophistication as he eloquently reads the news to settlers for ten cents a listener. Braver than he should be in his sunset years, Kidd agrees to single-handedly escort an orphan girl across 400 miles of dangerous Indian territory. Gardner tenderly portrays the 10-year-old’s resentment and gradual trust as she is torn from the Kiowa tribe who kidnapped her and slowly rediscovers her original culture and the German and English languages she once spoke. Gardner’s unpretentious narration does justice to Jiles’s often exquisite turns of phrase and graceful depictions of the ethnically diverse American West. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
08/22/2016
Jiles delivers a taut, evocative story of post–Civil War Texas in this riveting drama of a redeemed captive of the Kiowa tribe. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an elderly widower, earns his living traveling around, reading news stories to gatherings of townspeople. While reading in Wichita Falls one evening in the winter of 1870, he sees an old acquaintance. Britt Johnson, the main character in Jiles’s The Color of Lightning, has just come through Indian Country with his crew. The men are returning a 10-year-old girl to her aunt and uncle in Castroville after she spent four years with the Kiowa. A free black man, Britt is reluctant to have a white child in his custody. He persuades the Captain to escort young Johanna on the remainder of the three-week journey. The Captain, who has grown daughters of his own, at first feels sorry for the girl. Johanna considers herself Kiowa; she chafes at wearing shoes and a dress, struggles to pronounce American words. Challenges and dangers confront the two during their journey, and they become attached. Jiles unfolds the stories of the Captain and Johanna, past and present, with the smooth assuredness of a burnished fireside tale, demonstrating that she is a master of the western. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Oct.)
Library Journal
12/01/2015
Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an army veteran, makes his living in 1870 as a "reader" who travels around north Texas reading from various newspapers to a dime-a-head audience. A septuagenarian, he undertakes a 400-mile odyssey from Wichita Falls, TX, to San Antonio with a reluctant Johanna Leonberger, who has no memory of her life before she was kidnapped by the Kiowa Indians. Along the way, the ten-year-old warms up to the widowed captain as they face a number of perilous encounters. After venturing away from historical fiction to try her hand at dystopian fiction in Lighthouse Island, Canadian American author Jiles returns to mining lush Texas history and resurrecting some of the characters from 2009's The Color of Lightening in this tale. VERDICT This Western is not to be missed by Jiles's fans and lovers of Texan historical fiction. The final chapter's solid resolution will satisfy those who like to know what ultimately becomes of beloved characters. [See Prepub Alert, 9/21/15.]—Wendy W. Paige, Shelby Cty. P.L., Morristown, IN
JULY 2016 - AudioFile
Narrator Grover Gardner’s charming voice lends the perfect touch to Captain Jefferson Kidd, a lonely widower in 1870 Texas. Gardner smoothly portrays Kidd’s sophistication as he eloquently reads the news to settlers for ten cents a listener. Braver than he should be in his sunset years, Kidd agrees to single-handedly escort an orphan girl across 400 miles of dangerous Indian territory. Gardner tenderly portrays the 10-year-old’s resentment and gradual trust as she is torn from the Kiowa tribe who kidnapped her and slowly rediscovers her original culture and the German and English languages she once spoke. Gardner’s unpretentious narration does justice to Jiles’s often exquisite turns of phrase and graceful depictions of the ethnically diverse American West. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-01-20
In post-Civil War Texas, a 10-year-old girl makes an odyssey back to her aunt and uncle's home after living with the Kiowa warriors who had killed her parents four years earlier. Johanna Leonberger remembers almost nothing of her first 6 years, when she lived with her parents. Instead, her memory extends only as far as her Kiowa family—she speaks no English and by white standards is uncivilized. Tired of being harassed by the cavalry, the Kiowa sell her back to an Indian agent for "fifteen Hudson's Bay four-stripe blankets and a set of silver dinnerware." Enter Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a 70-year-old veteran of two wars and, in 1870, when the novel takes place, a professional reader—he travels through Texas giving public readings from newspapers to an audience hungry for events of the world. At first reluctant to take her the 400 miles to the town near San Antonio where her aunt and uncle live, he soon realizes his itinerant life makes him the most plausible person for the job—and he also knows it's the right thing to do. He buys a wagon, and they start their journey, much to the reluctance and outrage of the undomesticated Johanna; but a relationship soon begins to develop between the two. Jiles makes the narrative compelling by unsentimentally constructing a bond based at least in part on a mutual need for survival, but slowly and delicately, Johanna and Kidd begin to respect as well as need one another. What cements their alliance is facing many obstacles along the way, including an unmerciful landscape; a lack of weapons; and a vicious cowboy and his companions, who want to kill Kidd and use the girl for their own foul purposes. As one might expect, Kidd and Johanna eventually develop a deep and affectionate relationship; when they arrive at the Leonbergers, the captain must make a difficult choice about whether to leave the girl there or hold onto her himself. Lyrical and affecting, the novel succeeds in skirting clichés through its empathy and through the depth of its major characters.
