[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.