by Cloggie Downunder (Australia): News Of The World is the eighth novel by bestselling American author, Paulette Jiles. In the last days of winter, 1870, widowed father of two adult daughters, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is in Wichita Falls Texas to read the news. At a dime per listener, mere weeks off turning seventy-two, this is how the veteran and survivor of several wars makes a living.
On this occasion, though, he sees in his audience that black freighter, Britt Johnson wants to speak to him. The Indian Agent, Samuel Hammond has charged Britt with the care and transport of a ten-year-old white girl, captured by the Kiowa and kept for four years before being ransomed for fifteen blankets and a silver dinnerware set. Johanna Leonberger’s Aunt Anna and Uncle Wilhelm have paid a fifty-dollar Spanish gold piece for her return to Castroville, near San Antonio.
Of course, a white girl with a group of black men is impossible, so Britt implores Kidd to take her. But Johanna, clad in a decorated deerskin shift, feather in her hair, sees herself as Ay-ti-Podle, Cicada, the daughter of Turning Water and Three Spotted, knows nothing of her former life, speaks no English, wants only to return to the Kiowa. “She would find out where they were going and then either escape or starve herself to death. It was not worth being alive when one was alone among aliens.”
Even though Kidd feels he’s done with child-raising, and the journey of some four hundred miles will take weeks, he just can’t refuse. The gold goes to a spring wagon which his packhorse, Fancy will pull while his saddle horse, Pasha is tied at the back. Johanna’s delousing, bathing and dressing in western clothing by the town’s women meets violent resistance, but soon they depart with a bare minimum of equipment and supplies.
Their journey south is a challenging one. At each town Kidd has to arrange care for Johanna while he does the reading that earns the coin to provision their travel, and it’s no surprise that she attempts an escape. There are rivers to cross, and Kidd’s insistence on avoiding reading from local papers that are full of politics sees them doing more than one midnight flit.
Before they reach their destination, there are encounters with US army soldiers, self-appointed law enforcers, and a family of murderous cowboys. And then there’s the gun battle with a blond-headed man and his two Caddo Indian sidekicks whose intentions are far from pure.
He summarises his situation: “He was trying to care for a semi-savage girl child and fend off criminals who would kidnap her for the most dreadful purposes and at the same time make enough money in the only way he knew how so they might eat and travel and on top of that evade the brutal political clashes of Texans. A tall order.”
In their enforced close association, though, Johanna and Kidd form a bond, and he begins to wonder, and worry about, what will happen to this courageous girl, so aware of the world around her, innovative and kind, when they reach her aunt and uncle.
Most of the story is related by Kidd, but Jiles occasionally gives Johanna a voice too. Her descriptive prose is gorgeous, the setting and era expertly rendered. The print version has an extract of Jiles’s earlier work, The Color of Lightning, while the e-book has an extract of her next book, Simon The Fiddler. The audio version is brilliantly narrated by Grover Gardner. An informative, thought-provoking, and incredibly moving story.
