Kimball’s first novel since the well-received Harvesting Ballads, examines the expansion toward the Western United States in the years following the Civil War through the eyes of blacks and Native Americans, generally underrepresented in the history of this period. In this novel, which intercuts among different stories, narrators, and time periods, we see newly freed slaves searching for a place to live and rebuffed at every turn; a Texas girl, kidnapped by Indians, betrothed to a kind brave who eventually becomes part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show; and a young toddler’s being raised by coyotes, only to be discovered by his kin later and retrained to be “human.” This certainly is a unique book: a literary Western that forgoes the traditional genre conventions, putting the “action” in the background and emphasizing how these characters deal with what little the West really had to offer them. Kimball’s deromanticized tales will find an audience interested in an alternative view of the late 1800s the History Channel doesn’t provide.
-Marc A. Kloszewski