Blue Horse Dreaming Book

""I will not live among you," Abigail Buwell says when she is taken from her life among the savages and returned, against her will, to "civilization" - the last military outpost on the frontier's hostile edge. Only Major Robert Cutter, the commander into whose hands she is delivered, hears her words." Abigail Buwell views her "redemption" as captivity, with freedom still far out of reach. Major Cutter, crushed by the Civil War and its aftermath, struggles to free himself of the doubts - and a boy - that haunt him. And journalist Reed Gabriel finds that both the story he wants to write and his own life are trapped within Abigail Buwell's silence.

The New York Times

The figure of the captive who goes native and refuses to be rescued is a very old one, a variation on the even older idea of the noble savage. The originality of Wallace's novel lies not in her plot but in the powerful and often beautiful language with which she conveys Abigail's sensibility and the major's sorrow … Time and again, Wallace finds the one right word to lift an otherwise ordinary sentence into art: ''She blows into the sightless eyes of her infant and then passes her free hand over them, charming death to come.'' — Max Byrd