News of the World by Paulette Jiles

A book review

Captain Jefferson Kidd, age seventy-one, makes his living by traveling from town to town reading newspaper articles to groups of people curious about the news of the world. The Civil War is over, but tempers remain high. He is careful in choosing which articles to read and in what order to read them. After a reading in Wichita Falls, a free black man he knows asks him to deliver a ten-year-old white girl, newly freed from captivity with a Kiowa band, to her relatives near San Antonio. He offers Kidd the fifty-dollar gold piece a government agent gave him for the job. Kidd argues, but in the end, it’s not the money that moves him to accept, but his sympathy for the girl’s plight and his understanding that he is the only person in a position to transport her safely.

Johanna is difficult. She has been with the Kiowa for four years and wants to stay with them, but they have cast her out. “Her faultless silence made her seem strangely not present. She had the carriage of every Indian he had ever seen and there was a sort of kinetic stillness about them and yet she was a ten-year-old girl with dark blond hair in streaks and blue eyes and freckles.” He knows that if he relaxes his vigilance, she will run. And that she has no safe place to run to.

As Kidd and Johanna begin, tentatively, to trust each other, they are ambushed by a group of men, white and Caddo, who want to kidnap and use her. It’s an intense, surprising scene, brilliantly conceived and written, that turns a corner in the story. By the end, readers will care about Johanna as much as Kidd has come to. News of the World is a page-turner filled with well-crafted prose, a moving tale that never turns sentimental, an altogether extraordinary novel. (2016, 213 pages including a brief author’s note about the history behind the story)