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NEWS OF THE WORLD flows beautifully as we follow Captain Kidd and Johanna on their 400-mile journey that Captain Kidd regretfully had accepted. She didn't know who they were, and they didn't know her. Johanna had been kidnapped by the Kiowa Indians after her family was killed in a raid, but Johanna was now released and needed to be returned to her aunt and uncle. ReviewĬaptain Kidd had experience traveling uncharted lands as he read his newspapers in different towns to spread the news of the world, but traveling with a ten-year-old girl who couldn't speak English was quite a different task for him.

Exquisitely rendered and morally complex, News of the World is a brilliant work of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become in the eyes of the law a kidnapper himself. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forging a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.Īrriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act civilized.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous.

army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna s parents and sister sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. It is1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world.