Color of Lighting - Jiles

Steven Heighton (Apr 10) in The New York Times reviews THE COLOR OF LIGHTNING By Paulette Jiles  (William Morrow / HarperCollins).  It begins "The hero of Paulette Jiles's third novel is a historical figure, a freed slave whose journey into the Texas Panhandle to rescue his wife and children — abducted not by slave traders but by Indians — derives from oral histories supported by a few traces of documentation. The novel begins in 1863 and ends in 1871, a few years before the local Indians were subdued and confined to reservations, and the great southern buffalo herd was annihilated, forever changing the land at."  Read more at  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Heighton-t.html?_r=1 Mike Shea (April) in the Texas Monthly reviews the same.  It begins "Stick a thumb into any page of Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning and you'll pull out a fine prose plum. The San Antonio author has trademarked an offhand lyricism, and she displays it amply in this intelligent Civil War–era novel: "Britt and Mary slept with the two children between them. They lay in their blankets like parentheses around the two lives in their care." The book is based on the life of Britt Johnson, an emancipated black man living in north-central Texas circa 1870."  Read more in your copy of the TM.  Steve Bennett of the San Antonio Express News has his review of it in the Houston Chronicle (April 2).  http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/books/reviews/6355998.html