The Holy Road

✍ Scribed by Blake, Michael

• Book ID: 108719624
• Publisher: Hrymfaxe
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 434 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

In The Holy Road, sequel to Dances With Wolves, master storyteller Michael Blake at long last continues the saga.

Eleven years have passed subce Lieutenant John Dunbar became Dances With Wolves and married Stands With A Fist, a white-born woman raised as a Comanche from early childhood. With their three children, they live peacefully in the village of Ten Bears. But there is unease in the air, caused by increased reports of violent confrontations with white soldiers, who want to drive the Comanches onto reservations.

Disquiet turns to horror, and then to rage, when a band of white rangers descends on Ten Bear's village, slaughtering half its inhabitants and abducting Stands With A Fist and her infant daughter. The three surviving great warriors - Wind In His Hair, Kicking Bird and Dances With Wolves - decide they must go to war with the white invaders. At the same time, Dances With Wolves realizes that only he can rescue his wife and child.

Told with the same sweep, insight, and majesty that have made Dances With Wolves a worldwide phenomenon, The Holy Road is an epic story of courage and honor.

From Publishers Weekly

Eleven years after winning an Academy Award for the film screenplay of his novel Dances with Wolves, Blake offers this dramatic sequel to his tale of army Lt. John Dunbar and his life with the Comanche Indians on the Great Plains. It is now 1874, 11 years after Dunbar deserted from the army to live among the Comanche. He has married Stands with a Fist, the captive white woman raised by Indians, and they have three children. Dunbar has forsworn the white man's ways and is accepted as Dances with Wolves, a full-fledged Comanche warrior. These are hard times for the Plains Indians, however, as the advance of the white man results in war, misery and a gloomy future. When a party of white rangers attacks his village and kidnaps his wife and youngest child, Dances with Wolves goes after them in a wild attempt at rescue. Alongside his tale of Dances with Wolves's personal turmoil, Blake more forcefully tells of the conflicts among the Indians regarding whether to fight the white man or to make peace. Raids, ambushes, atrocities and bitterness on both sides can have only one conclusion, despite an Indian peace delegation that goes to Washington, D.C., to meet the Great White Father. This novel focuses less on Dances with Wolves and much more on the confused plight of the Indians, who cannot understand the white man's greed, duplicity and brutality. Familiar characters from the original novel reappear here in more important roles, making this a more powerful historical novel with a much wider scope. Blake's ability to evoke sadness and joy, action and emotion is as strong as ever, and the ending hits hard. (Sept. 11)Forecast: Fans of the movie version of Dances with Wolves, starring Kevin Costner, will fall enthusiastically upon this sequel, though once they've bought it, they may be taken aback by the high ratio of history to heroics. A Western reading tour will attract extra attention.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Blake's sequel to his Dances with Wolves (1988) begins 11 years after the movie of that book ended. The former Lieutenant Dunbar is living peacefully with Stands with a Fist and their three children in the Comanche (not Lakota, as in the movie; there is a large cultural difference) village of Ten Bears. Change is in the wind. There are even fewer buffalo and more whites, and the white man's Holy Road, the railroad, looms larger with every passing year. Eventually, Texas Rangers descend on Ten Bears, kill half the inhabitants, and carry off Stands with a Fist and her infant daughter. Dances with Wolves, Wind in His Hair, and Kicking Bird decide to fight, but Dances with Wolves knows that he alone can rescue his family, and Kicking Bird wonders whether the Comanche are doomed. The subsequent action is brisk, vividly depicted, and, much to Blake's credit, devoid of gratuitous gore and artificial happy endings. Librarians should recognize that the book's potential readership is likely to be a function of the movie; be prepared to point out its Comanche, not Lakota, milieu; and direct the interested to Douglas C. Jones' Season of Yellow Leaf (1983) and Gone Are the Dreams and the Dancing (1984), which deal (arguably better) with the same period of Comanche history. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved