An old man who reads newspapers to frontier towns agrees to carry a girl four hundred miles home
An unlikely journey across Texas
In 1870, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a seventy-one-year-old widower, travels from town to town in northern Texas, reading the news aloud to paying audiences. In Wichita Falls he is offered a gold coin to deliver ten-year-old Johanna to her relatives near San Antonio. Taken by the Kiowa four years earlier, she has forgotten English and her first family, and the long trip south becomes a test for both of them.
Who will enjoy it
Readers who enjoy quiet, moving historical novels about unlikely friendships and the American West.
What you will get
A short, tender western about an old man and a girl learning to trust each other on a dangerous road, with spare, beautiful prose and an unforgettable bond.
News of the World Facts: Pages, Genre and Setting
Genre
Historical Fiction · Texas · Western · Road journey
Length
240 pages · ≈ 7 h
More about this book
Captain Kidd has lived through three wars and lost his printing business after the Civil War. Now, with his wife gone and his daughters grown, he enjoys the freedom of the road, setting up in town halls and reading stories from distant newspapers to people hungry for news of the wider world. In Wichita Falls, a freed Black freighter he knows asks him to take on a job: return Johanna Leonberger, recently ransomed from the Kiowa, to her aunt and uncle near San Antonio.
Johanna does not want to go. She remembers only her Kiowa family, speaks their language and tries to escape at every chance. The captain is patient and practical, and slowly they begin to communicate through gestures, a few words and shared meals. The journey of four hundred miles crosses a lawless country in the early years of Reconstruction, and the pair faces men who want to buy the girl, a running gunfight among the rocks and floods and hunger. By the time they reach the end of the road, both have changed, and the captain must decide what is truly best for her.
Brief, gentle and deeply affecting. About 240 pages in paperback. Adapted as a 2020 film.
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