A magnificently vivid and thoroughly heartwarming odd couple adventure tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd—an elderly (but still spry) widower and veteran of three wars who roams the towns of Northern Texas, spreading the good word that the 15th Amendment has just been ratified and reading newspaper stories from distant lands to town halls full of rapt locals—finds himself tasked with delivering a young orphan girl (the delightfully quarrelsome former Kiowa “captive” Johanna) across 400 miles of unsettled territory to her relatives in San Antonio. As I have detailed at excruciating length to anyone who’ll listen over the past three years, I love everything about this tender gem of a novel: the way Jiles textures her Old West landscape with Kidd’s tersely poetic observations and ironic musings, the old-fashioned getaway and gunsmoke thrills over which she allows her mismatched protagonists to bond, her masterful blending of humor and suspense, and the pleasure she takes in detailing a disappearing way of life. It’s an exquisite portrait of two wary, worn-out souls, starved of love and unmoored from the worlds they knew, finding unlikely solace in one another. What begins as a hilariously combative battle of wills between this unlikely pair of malcontents becomes, by the close, something altogether more poignant, more precious. If I’m making this sound treacly and sentimental, forgive me, for it is neither. There’s nothing cheap, nothing unearned about the warmth that radiates from its closing pages, the sweet sorrow we feel at their journey’s end.
–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor
Paulette Jiles, News of the World (2016)