This is the 7th novel in the McNulty series and once again I am amazed by how this author manages to produce such an authentic voice of a young Lakota Indian woman and creates such credible settings as this rural township post the American civil War. He never fails to please and inform. ( )

I had a real hard time at the start with the concept of this book. What is an Irish man doing, presuming to be able to tell the story from the point of view of a teenage Lakota girl, presuming to preach to us about American history? Why does he keep repeating that her people were all wiped out; The Lakota are still here! Another instance of well-meaning white men taking native children from their culture.
But it was well-written, and I had no trouble finishing it quickly.
Written in an uneducated-yet-intelligent style strongly reminiscent of Opal Whitely, there are a lot of quirky phrasings and images. Ah, the images of Winona's connection with nature are wonderful, and I can grudgingly grant that an Irishman may still be in touch with the spirits of the world. There is an unspoken subtext of homosexuality that is accepted as natural by Winona, and her experience of her 2 fathers as being warm and loving.
One portion bothered me. Winona, after returning from challenging an offender, promises to never go off like that again. Yet pretty soon she's taking off again and nobody makes mention of a broken promise. Doesn't ring true. The ending also came abruptly, leaving us without knowing what really happened. Somebody's got to pay for murder.
I'm also very disappointed that no mention is made of the evils of whiskey, but of course how could an Irish author write that, even tho it is very clear that whiskey has messed with Winona's memory.
eta: I didn't know this was part of a series. I suppose the ending will be explained in the next book. ( )

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, a massacre in the Wyoming territory leaves a young Lakota girl orphaned. She is rescued by two men who rename her Winona and take her with them to their hardscrabble farm in Tennessee. There she becomes a beloved member of a ragtag "family" of former soldiers who keep house and work the land alongside a couple of newly freed slaves. In spite of the warmth and loving kindness Winona receives at home and at work for the local lawyer, she is still viewed as a savage in a community of hooligans and night riders. After she suffers a beating and rape by unknown assailants, her protectors are quick to respond and seek justice on her behalf. But her own sketchy memory of the event and her lowly status in the community as a Native American do little to right these wrongs or give her peace. ( )

A minor but enjoyable work in the McNulty canon. Has lots of echoes of the superior Days Without End, but where that gave us action this has more mystery. ( )

A Thousand Moons - Barry
4 stars

”You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.”

This is Barry’s follow-up to Days Without End. I do not think it is possible to understand this book without reading the first one. The story is set in post Civil War Tennessee. Thomas McNulty and John Cole have settled on Lige Magan’s farm with their adopted daughter, Winona. The story is told in Winona’s voice. It’s uneven storytelling. Winona is clearly an unreliable narrator and she knows it. She cannot remember the brutal event that set a match to a powder keg of violent consequences. The storytelling is further obscured by Winona’s restricted vocabulary. Barry has projected a 19th century Southern dialect (that may or may not be accurate). Additionally, Winona’s narrative is further obscured by her reluctance, or complete inability, to name the crime. She was raped.

I have 25 meaningful passages of this book highlighted. I’d originally given this book a 3 star rating, but I bumped it up when I reread those highlights. There were things about this book that disappointed me, but Barry’s words still manage to sound a powerful chord in me. For example:

“An injury to one soul might be of small account in the great and endless flower-chain of human injuries. But was not the law designed to peer at each, one by one, and give everything equal weight betimes?”

The disappointment here is that I never forgot that the words came from the author. When I read The Secret Scripture, Roseanne McNulty walked off the page as a real person. In Days Without End, Thomas’ Irish blarney and complete sincerity made him live on the page. Winona is a complex, wounded, and vibrant young woman. But, I wasn’t ever able to forget that she was an author’s creation. I felt a 21st agenda in the 19th century setting. This isn’t a bad thing. It just didn’t feel as natural and seamless as in the other books.

Winona is raped while she is drunk. Certainly, this is an ageless scenario, but I somehow felt that Barry had plucked the issue from current headlines. Very realistically, Winona cannot remember the attack. It felt realistic, and simultaneously like an overly cumbersome plot device. However, Barry gives her profound words to express the emotional damage, “As so much time had gone by I was beginning to be horrified by a sense that what had happened to me was a nothing, a nothing served upon a nothing. A small little thing of no account that all girls had to bear in the general affairs of the world. That it would mean nothing to them and that the word nothing would be much in their mouths as they applied it to me. Under this thought I perished time and time again. I shivered in my sense of dreadful smallness.” It’s a heartbreaking statement, but it’s somehow devoid of the heavy dialect that is usually present in Winona’s voice.

There’s so much desperation in this book; the desperate poverty and grinding hard work of a small farm, the lawless, violent, resurgence of white supremacy. The plot builds with a heavy sense of dread that there is no possibility of justice for Winona, a full blooded native American, or for the Bouguereau siblings, freed slaves who work on the farm. I hoped for a happy ending for these characters. I didn’t expect it. The author was clearly present in the deus ex machina of the abrupt ending. ( )