Paulette Jiles · 2016 · overland

Paulette Jiles's 2016 novel. In 1870, an aging widower, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, criss-crosses Reconstruction Texas reading newspapers aloud to frontier towns for a dime a head. In Wichita Falls he takes on a hard commission: to deliver Johanna, a ten-year-old raised by the Kiowa and twice torn from a home, four hundred miles south to relatives near San Antonio she no longer remembers.

1. 1
   Wichita Falls

   In this North Texas town Captain Kidd is paid a fifty-dollar gold piece to carry Johanna, a girl recaptured from the Kiowa who speaks no English, south to the only kin she has left.

2. 2
   Dallas

   Through Dallas and the settled country the old man and the wary child begin their slow wagon journey, Kidd stopping in each town to read the news aloud and earn their way south.

3. 3
   Lampasas

   On the lonelier roads of central Texas the pair face bad men and worse weather; through a running fight and hard miles the captain and the girl come, slowly, to trust and need each other.

4. 4
   San Antonio

   Kidd's own home city, where he once ran a printing press and buried his wife - and where, near here, Johanna's German aunt and uncle wait to take in a niece they regard as half-wild.

5. 5
   Castroville

   At the family's hardscrabble farm the reunion is cold and cruel, and the captain must choose between the law and the child - a choice that will bind the two of them together for good.