“The child seems artificial as well as malign,” the captain observes at his first sight of Johanna, huddled under a blanket.

In the aftermath, she became Cicada, daughter of Turning Water and Three Spotted, and Kiowa to the soul - until she was traded to an Army agent for “15 Hudson’s Bay four-stripe blankets and a set of silver dinnerware.” Now twice orphaned, she has forgotten the English language and everything about her earlier life. Ten-year-old Johanna Leonberger was 6 when the Kiowa took her captive after murdering her parents and little sister. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a septuagenarian widower, former soldier and printer, travels around North Texas entertaining grim little audiences with newspaper readings about these troubling times, leavened with tales of the world’s “distant magic,” from erupting volcanoes to “electromagnetic disturbances in the ether.”ĭespite trafficking in wonders, the captain’s own life strikes him as “thin and sour,” and it only looks to be getting worse when he’s introduced to an expressionless little girl, referred to by her escort as “that maniac,” who needs to be returned to relatives outside San Antonio, a wildly hazardous 400-mile journey.

The Indian wars smolder on and federal troops remain in Texas, enforcing a ban on side arms. The 15th Amendment has just been ratified, granting the vote to all qualified men “without regard to race or color,” and the air is full of dank mutterings. The town’s mood is as ugly as the weather. $22.99.Īs Paulette Jiles’s new novel opens, it’s the winter of 1870 in Wichita Falls, Tex., and raining hard. NEWS OF THE WORLD By Paulette Jiles 213 pp.

Paulette jiles new book