Review by Booklist Review
Freelance journalist Fergus ( One Thousand White Women0 , 1998) uses historical events as a springboard for this riveting epic shot through the lens of Depression photographer Ned Giles. After the death of his parents, 17-year-old Giles leaves behind his job at a Chicago country club to join the Great Apache Expedition, a journey organized by citizens of the U.S and Mexico to recover the kidnapped son of a Mexican rancher. Exploring Mexico's Sierra Madres is an opportunity too rich to resist for Giles, who lucks into a job as one of the expedition's photographers. But when he captures the chilling image of a wild Apache girl in a Mexican jail, the young man cannot, in good conscience, turn his back and walk away: " La nina bronca0 , this slight starving creature curled in a fetal position on the stone floor . . . the shadows of the iron bars falling like a convict's striped uniform across her naked body." Giles and fellow travelers (including a flamboyant preppie, a fierce female anthropologist, and a stoic Apache scout) risk life and limb to set the feral girl free. Fans of both Larry McMurtry and Louis L'Amour will relish this deftly rendered tale of survival, self-discovery, and the precarious boundaries between man and beast. --Allison Block Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Depicting the dusty Depression-era West this grandly, cinematically imagined sweat- and bloodstained saga, inspired by events that took place in Arizona and south of the border in the Sierra Madre badlands, dramatizes latter-day conflicts between whites and Native Americans. During the fall of 1999, an obscure, financially struggling photographer, Ned Giles-now in his early 80s-sells, for $30,000, La Nina Bronca, his only copy of a photo of a young Apache girl lying on the rude floor of a Mexican jail cell; the buyer's curiosity about the picture's provenance sparks Ned's memories. The rest of the book, set in 1932, reveals a legacy of heroism and lost love through Ned's scrupulously detailed diaries, which vividly recount a nightmare of harrowing misadventures beginning the day he signs on to be a part of the Great Apache Expedition, one of dozens of men hoping to free the son of a wealthy Mexican rancher kidnapped by the Apaches. (The wild Apache girl will be used as ransom.) The narrative unfolds as a series of flashbacks, intermingling short passages from the third-person POV of the fierce Apache girl and first-person excerpts from the diaries of the 17-year-old Chicagoan photographer on his first big assignment. Fergus (One Thousand White Women) makes unforgettable characters move against vivid landscapes in this laudable encore. Agent, Al Zuckerman at Writers House. 5-city author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ned Giles hops onto the 1932 Great Apache Expedition and finds love and hard decisions in the wilds of the West. Apparently based on historical fact; from the author of One Thousand White Women. Simultaneous Hyperion hardcover. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Historical adventure with a conscience set in 1930s Mexico. At a retrospective of his work in 1999, crusty, impoverished photographer Ned Giles sells his last print of La Nina Bronca, the lithe, wild Apache Indian girl whom he stumbled on, starving, in a Mexican jail when he was 17 and whose portrait made his career. Newly orphaned Ned had left Depression Chicago for the lure of the Great Apache Expedition in Arizona, organized ostensibly to rescue a kidnapped boy but in fact to give rich whites an excuse for a hunting jaunt (by this time, the Apaches of the Sierra Madre are in actuality being driven from the land and bounty-hunted to extinction). A sequence of lucky breaks lands Ned a role on the exclusive expedition, along with training as a photographer. He and other colorful members of the group--Tolley, a privileged gay; Margaret, an anthropology student; Albert and Joseph, two Apache scouts--liberate La Nina Bronca (real name: Chideh) and try to swap her for the kidnapped boy but are themselves captured by the Native Americans, led by a white man, a famous kidnap victim himself named Charley McComas. Now it's Chideh's turn to save the whites from torture and rape--in Ned's case by claiming him for her husband. After bursts of violence and derring-do, trips between the two camps, and an idyll for Ned and Chideh, villainous Police Chief Gatlin and the Mexican colonel force a confrontation between the Apache and the "White Eyes," an event that naturally results in betrayal, bloodshed and dispersal, as well as constituting a rite of passage for Ned. Chideh (possibly pregnant), Margaret, and Albert disappear with the Apaches, leaving Ned to a long life of photojournalism and rueful reflection. Fergus (One Thousand White Women, 1988) writes simply and sincerely in a brisk tale that offers a compassionate portrait of the beleaguered Native Americans. Still, predictable in form and stereotyped in character, it rarely rises above the conventional. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
