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  • The Color of Lightning

  • By: Paulette Jiles
  • Narrated by: Jack Garrett
  • Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (9 ratings)
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The Color of Lightning cover art

The Color of Lightning

By: Paulette Jiles
Narrated by: Jack Garrett
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Editor reviews

Is anyone not fascinated by cases of captives who lived among Indians and escaped to tell about it? This novel opens with a Kiowa raid on settlers in northern Texas in the 1870s. So convincingly does Jiles imagine her characters - Indian, white, and black - and compellingly tell their stories that it comes as a surprise that much here is based on real people and events. Jack Garrett's performance is stellar. Three different races - men, women, and children - come vividly to life, their personalities distinct even though their stories are separated from ours by more than a century. It's a sweeping tale, never dry or fact-bound, and Garrett's sympathetic attention and unflagging skill are a perfect match for Jiles's marvelous invention.

Summary

In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion - and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies. Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children - wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa. Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility - dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable - his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary severely damaged and enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them - the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.

Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.

A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post - Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American ...
©2009 Paulette Jiles (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers
Literary Fiction Historical Fiction
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Profile Image for Eamon

Brilliant gripping story

This is a fantastic story .
Lots of surprises and highly entertaining.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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