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AS PAULETTE JILES'S new novel opens, it's the winter of 1870 in Wichita Falls, Tex., and raining hard. The town's mood is as ugly as the weather. 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 Indian wars smolder on and federal troops remain in Texas, enforcing a ban on side arms. Capt. 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." Despite 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. Ten-year-old Johanna Leonberger was 6 when the Kiowa took her captive after murdering her parents and little sister. 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. "The child seems artificial as well as malign," the captain observes at his first sight of Johanna, huddled under a blanket. Nevertheless, he agrees to transport her for "a Spanish coin of eight escudos in 22-karat gold." With it, he buys a wagon painted with the legend "Curative Waters East Mineral Springs Texas" in gold letters and packs it with supplies. The town whores obligingly strip Johanna of her deerskin shift decorated with elk teeth, give her a bath (she has lice) and cram her into worsted stockings, undergarments and a dress, a process that requires two hours and ruins the establishment's wallpaper. And off the captain and Johanna go. As one might expect, the old man is tough but the little girl is tougher; their road is hard and their enemies bad; they forge a kinship based on mutual respect as they contend with ambushes, shootouts, brawls, perilous river crossings and good-hearted widow ladies. At every turn, this story square-dances with cliché, and at every turn it's thrilling. Jiles, a poet as well as a novelist, has recognized that the best stories are the known ones, as long as they're told entrancingly and grow ever stranger as they roll on through familiar territory. Mostly she manages this small miracle by keeping her story quietly ironic and exquisitely particular. Lest one should hope for Johanna's return to the Kiowa, as she painfully desires, it's made clear that, threatened with losing their rations and being hunted down by the cavalry, they no longer want her. Wisely, Jiles reveals Johanna's deep attachment to her former life only through what persists of it: "Like all people who do not wear shoes her big toes pointed straight ahead." Both the place and the period are rendered with precise economy, and the characters communicate their concerns mostly through what they keep an eye on. Guns, for one thing, which the captain, who has lived through three wars, knows as intimately as "his inks and his papers." When accosted by a company of United States Army infantrymen on horseback, he notes that they carry "squareback Navy Colt five-shot revolvers that looked as big as pork hams in their holsters." He can distinguish a revolver from a rifle shot by sound, though during one astonishing gun battle it's Johanna who provides an ingenious solution when he runs out of ammunition. But chiefly the captain tries to keep an eye on Johanna as she struggles to adjust to her new life, shown most vividly through her rediscovery of English. "Kep-dun," she calls him. "Chohenna," she learns to call herself. Along with so much else, she has permanently lost her "R"s - the Kiowa language has no R - and so "hungry" is "hungli," horse is "hoas." Like all returned captives, Johanna will be "never quite one thing or another," a reality reflected in her speech. She's "been through two creations," as one character puts it, leaving her forever alien. The "curative" aspect of Johanna's relationship with the captain is signaled from the first pages by that wagon. The real surprise in this fable-like story is the gorgeousness of their journey, from Spanish Fort along the flooded Red River, where a stormy sky is filled with "blinding neurons of fire," to "the red and pink granite" mountains north of Llano. In a world where live oak leaves fall "like pennies" and teams of oxen move in "a ponderous waltz," everything is news. And at scarcely 200 pages, this exhilarating novel, a finalist for this year's National Book Award, travels through its marvelous terrain so quickly that one is shocked, almost stricken, to reach the end. So do what I did: Read it again. SUZANNE BERNE'S most recent novel is "The Dogs of Littlefield"

Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an army veteran, makes his living in 1870 as a "reader" who travels around north Texas reading from various newspapers to a dime-a-head audience. A septuagenarian, he undertakes a 400-mile odyssey from Wichita Falls, TX, to San Antonio with a reluctant Johanna Leonberger, who has no memory of her life before she was kidnapped by the Kiowa Indians. Along the way, the ten-year-old warms up to the widowed captain as they face a number of perilous encounters. After venturing away from historical fiction to try her hand at dystopian fiction in Lighthouse Island, Canadian American author Jiles returns to mining lush Texas history and resurrecting some of the characters from 2009's The Color of -Lightening in this tale. VERDICT This Western is not to be missed by Jiles's fans and lovers of Texan historical fiction. The final chapter's solid resolution will satisfy those who like to know what ultimately becomes of beloved characters. [See Prepub Alert, 9/21/15.]-Wendy W. Paige, Shelby Cty. P.L., Morristown, IN © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.