Reviews for Color of Lightning

The average rating for Color of Lightning based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-12 00:00:00 Dirk Rozendale The cover blurb from the Washington Post on my edition says, "Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted...This is glorious work.". That just about covers it. Yes, a glorious work. Well written historical fiction can teach me more than years in a classroom, because it gives me people with personalities, names, faces, motives; it leads me step by step into dangerous but lovely landscapes, it shows me why certain things happened as they did, and in this book it explains so much about the western expansion and the tragedy of the American Indian. I get overwhelmed just thinking of how to describe this book and all it contains. Very basically, it is the story of Britt Johnson, who comes to Texas as a free black man just after the Civil War. He has plans to become a freighter, hauling goods by wagon to outposts and forts. The Commanche raid his community, kill his oldest son, and take his wife and two younger children captive. He sets out to find them. It's also the story of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker sent to work with Indian Affairs, who discovers that all the love and Christian charity in the world is sometimes useless. The author also miraculously gets us to understand the native American mind-set, and in so doing shows us the heartbreak and tragedy of a brave people who couldn't fight white man's progress. A warning to those who don't like violence; this book has a lot of it. Really though, how can you write about the West without it, if you want the whole story of what it took to survive in that time, and the courage needed to try? Paulette Jiles includes the violence, but then gives us the most beautiful prose to make up for it. I seem to be reading her books in backward order, as I started with News of the World, her latest book. I will surely add her two earlier books to my list now, and eagerly wait for whatever she does next.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-08 00:00:00 Mark Adams 3.5 stars, rounded up Fair warning, this book starts on a pretty violent note with an Indian raid against a settlement in Texas. And it doesn't lighten up. It's dark and depressing. There are multiple story lines here, all taking place at the same time, the end of the Civil War through 1871. The first belongs to Britt Johnson, a freedman who loses his family to the raid. The second belongs to Samuel Hammond, a Quaker tasked with overseeing the Friend's Indian Affairs for the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Kiowa-Apache, the same tribes involved in the raid. And then Elizabeth, one of the women captured during the raid and now living with the Comanche and Mary, Britt's wife, also captured but with the Kiowa. Jiles does a wonderful job of painting time and place, whether Philadelphia, Texas or the Indian Territories. As the warden in Cool Hand Luke says, what we have here is a failure to communicate. Neither side can understand the other's way of life and look down their noses at each other. Each feels that they are in the right. I appreciated that two of her main characters are black and thus outside of both cultures. I can't say I enjoyed this book the way I did The News of the World. I appreciated it, though, for the story it told and the points it made. Like with TNotW, my main sympathy was with the children that were captured by Indians but then returned to the settlers. Britt Johnson and most of the others actually lived and the story is based on their lives, but major liberties are taken due to the minimal facts known.