Whew. I haven't stayed up late unable to put down a book for a very long time. About halfway through this book, the pace picks up and suddenly you are in an emotional avalanche, along with the characters.
The plot is made up of up to four strands: the main one follows a 17-year-old whose mother has just died and whose father is emotionally unavailable. The other major strand is about a young Cheyenne girl in the fateful year of 1876. Another strand briefly follows the first girl's father. And another one follows a young Cheyenne man employed by the father.
How these four people impact (or don't impact) one another is the crux of the book. In trying to do the right thing, Erin ends up in every mother's nightmare situation, and somehow comes through it intact and more self-aware. Her great-great-grandfather's journals of the Indian wars help her do this, but she is mostly dependent on herself to find a way to survive what life has dealt her.
It's a sad book, but far from hopeless. In fact, that's why I couldn't put it down: Erin is scared and hopeless for much of the latter part of the book, but the author does a good job in not wallowing in her hopelessness. He seems to be saying that no matter how hopeless life is, something inside of everyone will keep us going. Sometimes in spite of all conscious reasoning to the contrary...
Although it's not inscribed anywhere in the book, the theme of this seems to be Oliver Goldsmith's lines from 1761:
- For he who fights and runs away
May live to fight another day;
But he who is in battle slain
Can never rise and fight again.
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