News of the World

An interesting and compact little Western that makes full use a unique protagonist for the genre and balances atmospheric prose and action without letting either run the show for too long.

Hard to review something like this when the book blurb that markets it gives away 90% of the plot, but I enjoyed it well enough. The third person omniscient point of view felt a little too detached for me and I wish we had been tied a little closer to "Captain" so that the reader wasn't aware of things before the characters were. I'm not saying this story needed to be told in first person, but I wanted to feel more involved and not like I was watching the story from 10,000 feet.

Still, this world felt authentic and lived-in, and all of the characters felt real and their actions felt justified; no plot holes here! Even got my heartstrings tugged on a bit at the end, which is no small feat for such a short book.

"Human aggression and depravity still managed to astonish him."

Captain Kidd, a retired Army soldier, now travels the late-1800s western United States delivering news from handpicked newspapers to small towns and small cities looking for glimpses at a world they'll never see. While on one of these stops, he's tasked with returning "Johanna" to blood relatives living in south Texas. "Johanna" was captured by Kiowa raiders when very young, and then ransomed back to the US Army. She remembers nothing of the world she was captured from, and initially wants only to be returned to the only family she's known. Captain Kidd agrees to take her, and we're brought along on their journey of unlikely friendship and musings about belonging and identity to her Texas family.

This was a super sweet book with a super sweet premise that I thought I'd find boring because I don't normally do super sweet fluffy books. The writing was phenomenal though, and my heart went out to this young girl grappling with large concepts of trying to figure out where she fits into the two worlds that don't seem to want her. I ended up really enjoying the journey this book took me on, and I especially loved the "where we all ended up" style ending that I know isn't everyone's taste.

There's also evidently a movie that was made for this book back in 2020 that I missed (for, I guess, obvious reasons), that I might even check out.

Extremely evocative of an innocent, simpler time. Our guide and bearer of news from the world after the civil war, Jefferson Kidd, is a wise, brave, grumpy grandfather and widower. The diverse characters that come in and out of his life are intriguingly rendered by Jiles, to the point that she must satisfy the reader's curiosity, explaining the fate of them all in detail. And Kidd's sidekick, Johanna, is rendered in such detail that her internal, unspoken struggle brought me to tears as I read out loud to my parents. My mother and father had to repeatedly take over for me when I got choked up. And the intellectual linguist in you will delight at the intricate explanations of the Kiowa language and culture, not to mention the now arcane language of preindustrial Texas and the southeastern US. Normally this would be a 5-star for me. The only detractor is the relatively basic and cliche writing of the first few chapters, as Jiles sucks in the average reader, before unleashing the spoils of her research on the persistent reader in the later chapters. She does eventually unleash her deeper creativity and illuminates the human condition without cliche or boring soundbites. Hang in there. The journey is worth the knocks of the bumpy road at the start.

An excellent Western by the author of the Color of Lightning; there is even a cameo appearance by Britt Johnson. The author continues to explore the phenomenon of the settler’s child captured by Indians and later returned. Except for a single distracting letter that, as TV executives say, “lays a lot of cable”, the structure of the novel is tight, moving and satisfying. Westerns are pretty spare, and you can think of the text as comprising narration and dialogue separated by descriptive paragraphs, e.g. a description of the landscape, and brief more intellectual asides perhaps in the form of a character’s thoughts. Some of these latter elements here are our view of the characters, and in this case the pair of the captured girl and the old Texan are very pleasing with some philosophical and moral heft that contribute to the strength of the book. According to an acknowledgment, the protagonist is based on a real character who read the news in North Texas.
The author has chosen to write her dialogue without any punctuation. This works about 80% of the time.
The author seems widely informed about the historical details of Texas at this time, but there is mention of a safety on what is probably a .38 caliber variant of an 1870 Smith & Wesson model 3. Revolvers don’t have a safety, and except for some 19th century guns that could be half-cocked or where the hammer could rest on the cylinder between chambers, I don’t think they ever have had one.

 [a:Suzanne Berne|132795|Suzanne Berne|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] recommended reading [b:News of the World|25817493|News of the World|Paulette Jiles|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440342988l/25817493.SX50.jpg|45674421] twice, as she did, in her Nov. 13 NY Times Book Review piece on it. Coming from a busy author and critic, that says a lot about this National Book Award finalist novel about a 71-year-old Civil War Veteran’s 400-mile journey through Texas to return a 10-year-old girl to her hometown, after spending four years being raised by the Kiowa Indian tribe.
 There’s enough poetry in this book’s 209 pages to make reading it even three times time well spent. A poet and memoirist as well as a novelist, [a:Paulette Jiles|70102|Paulette Jiles|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1346771427p2/70102.jpg]’s descriptions of the parts of Texas traveled and the people who lived there are so vivid that if you told me she went back in time to 1870 and made the journey herself I’d believe you.
 News of the World is often compared to [a:Charles Portis|27034|Charles Portis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1197496305p2/27034.jpg]’s True Grit and that’s fitting. Jiles’s characters have that unsparring hardness of people of that time and place (“Some people were born unsupplied with a human conscience and those people needed killing”) but they as often have feelings of great tenderness. News of the World will put a lump in many of its readers’ throats.