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Jul 16, 2018wyenotgo rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
A full-hearted 5 stars! Best thing I've read so far this year. Paulette Jiles lets the reader get to know the two main characters incrementally as the story goes along and as the relationship between them develops and works its changes on both of them. That central premise, the complex relationship between an older man or grandfather figure and a daughter has proven powerful again and again for centuries --Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias, Wagner's Die Walküre: Die Opern der Welt, Shute's Pied Piper and obviously Gray's Little Orphan Annie come to mind. And Jiles exploits the idea to the full. In Johanna, we are presented with one of the most engaging and feistiest little kids to be found in literature. The tale is greatly enriched by its portrayal of a unique time and place -- chaotic, dangerous, corrupt post-civil war northern Texas, a land whose people have in short succession lived under the regimes of Spain, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy and finally the Union army and a horde of carpetbaggers. And all the while the last of the Indian wars was continuing. Happily, this is a book that more than lives up to its glowing reviews.