He also chose what the news was going to be by selecting different stories for different crowds, deciding what they would know of the world.
It was also how Kidd got news, from the people he ran into and how he saw them interact. It told us how the world worked with slavery gone and a post-war economy in fluctuation. One was that the book gave us the news of the world of Texas in the 1870s. We talked about the title quite a bit and had several interpretations. Though, we thought that Johanna leaving may make the aunt and uncle want their $50 back since they ‘paid’ for her in the first place. We felt she began to trust him early on when they ran into soldiers and he didn’t hand her over to them. We felt he may have left her if her relatives had been less cruel to her. The relationship between the two was cemented late in the novel when Captain Kidd saw how Johanna was being used as slave labor by her aunt and uncle. We laughed when recalling the scene where Johanna wanted to scalp the men who tried to kill them and Captain Kidd deemed that ‘impolite.’ If she’d been the young German girl she was born to be, she may not have been able to survive the trip to her relatives. Johanna’s time with the Kiowa made her resilient she was strong and could endure a lot of hardships.
It was a flashback to a book we read a few years ago, The Bohemians. He was also a printer in the West at the same time period. The main character sounded a bit like Twain as well. Maybe it was the influence of writing poetry.Ī reader mentioned that the style reminded her of Mark Twain. We wondered if she wrote all of her books this way. It took a while for the readers to get used to it. I listened to the book but those who read it said there was no quotation marks or other punctuation for dialogue. Though, I do love being pleasantly surprised when an author can write another gender. Captain Kidd was well drawn and the world he lived in felt rather ‘masculine.’ Johanna wasn’t a particularly feminine character either. If we hadn’t known the author’s name, many of us would have been surprised it was written by a woman. None of us had read Jiles before but she’s published about fifteen books including poetry, memoir, and children’s. It was a short book, a nice break after some very long titles over the past few months. My book club met a few weeks ago to discuss Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World.
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