First Line: Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870. Captain Kidd laid out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment.
In the years following the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through north Texas giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. His life takes a major turn when he reluctantly agrees to take a ten-year-old girl who'd been captured by the Kiowa back to her family outside of San Antonio. Raised by the Kiowa since the age of six, they are the only family Johanna knows. She has no desire to learn the language or "civilized" ways of the whites, let alone to go and live among them.
Kidd knows that most captives brought back to their white families do not fare well. Besides, he's lived through three wars and fought in two of them, and he enjoys his solitary existence. With two such very different people, it's no wonder that the perilous journey the old man and the young girl make will change both their lives forever.
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Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is an interesting blend of pragmatist and dreamer, and he introduced me to an occupation that I'd been completely unaware of: that of a traveling newsreader who brings the outside world to people hungry for news. It's his belief that "If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place." Watching his character develop-- as well as that of the young Johanna-- is the best part of News of the World, and Paulette Jiles gives a strong, steady pulse to her characters and setting.
Kidd is a man in his early seventies who has grown children as well as grandchildren. A printer by trade, he's grown accustomed to his nomadic, solitary existence, so watching the growing bond between the old man and his young charge as they make their perilous way through Texas is a quiet thing of beauty.
Perhaps it is because I felt so invested in the characters that I had an adverse reaction to the way Jiles concluded her book. The ending felt rushed as it galloped through several years. I would have much preferred that News of the World gave those years the treatment they deserved, or that the book ended when little Johanna finally arrived home. When all is said and done, I found Jiles' novel to be an absorbing read that was marred by its conclusion.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
eISBN: 9780062409225
William Morrow © 2017
eBook, 212 pages
Historical Fiction, Standalone
Rating: B
Source: Purchased from Amazon.
