3.5

This author has a beautiful writing style with vivid descriptions that swept me right into the story.

This book paints a vivid picture of life in the Sandhills just a decade after the massacre at Wounded Knee. The Sandhills and ranch life are a character of their own in this book, and one of the better characters too. Beauty and bleakness, weather extremes, livestock and the layout of ranch buildings are described with great detail tensions between the Indians and the settlers so soon after Wounded Knee are also constantly in the background bringing this time and this place to life. Into this local rancher JB Bennett is discovered dead alongside the shallow grave of a young Native American girl, bringing the Bennett's and their family issues together, JB's estranged wife Dulcinea returns, JB's despicable father Drum breaks his ankle and has to stay in JB's house, and the two sons who while still young have been raised apart become mixed up with Rose, the murdered girls older sister, and the search for their killers, family disputes over the ranch, and oil and gas speculators wanting to force ranchers to sell their mineral rights. While some of the "main" plotlines are less than satisfying I enjoyed this book and it's look at Sandhills life around the turn of the 20th century. I would rate this book 3.5 stars if Goodreads allowed half stars.

I didn’t want to put this one down. I loved the vivid storytelling and the complexity of each of the characters. Technically I guess this is a “murder mystery,” which isn’t usually my thing, but it felt much more complex and honest than your average “who done it.”

She stooped to pick a wild pink rose, avoiding the tiny spines that slivered like unseen glass hairs onto one's fingers. There was little scent, but the creamy softness of the petals like the insides of a dog's ear more than made up for it. She placed one on her tongue, and imagined she could taste the hills, the bittersweet tang of life.

This book started beautiful. I was completely mesmerized by the gorgeous descriptions of the prairies of Western Nebraska and Western South Dakota and the compassionate retellings of the sufferings of the Lakota Sioux. This book starts with a mystery that is one of the central conflicts of the story. The characters were complex and sketched with such subtlety and mystery that I was excited at the prospect of slowly unraveling their individual histories which led them to each moment.

She blew in like a hard west wind, the kind that dropped a man's bones to zero, froze his hair to his skull, and clogged his eyes with ice.

Dulcinea and Rose were especially compelling. A white woman from Chicago stuck out West and a sad but strong Lakota woman mourning her people drawn with such nuance and sensitivity I couldn't wait to see what Agee did with their stories.

After the halfway point, however, I felt like the book changed into something else entirely. To me, it was fairly obvious fairly quickly after they came on the scene who the murderer was. A character drawn with no subtlety, given almost no history or real motivation at all, when the Big Reveal came I was extremely disappointed to see I had been right. The ending itself was actually the biggest let down for me. I felt like it was overly melodramatic and saw the characters doing this which had previously seemed extremely out of character.

Overall, I enjoyed the writing and the descriptions of this land. I especially appreciated how Agee presented the Lakota characters, lending them gravitas and pain that can sometimes be diminished in other Westerns. I feel that this could have been an incredible Western but which lost its way at the end.

I love me a good western and I was so happy to snatch this book up! The story started off strong and gripping with a mystery involving dual murders. As is at the heart of many westerns, the rising tentions between homesteaders and natives brought another level of depth to the novel and mystery too. I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two strong women at the forefront of this story: Dulcinea, claiming her families land after her husband’s death, and Rose, striving to avenge her murdered family. The story is lovely, gritty, and brutal like all good westerns, but unfortunately the plot dragged on just a little too long and the mystery lost its edge by the end

Set in Nebraska, 10 years after the Wounded Knee massacre. A family works to preserve their cattle ranch and so,Vee two murder. The main characters are an Anglo woman and a Native American India woman, which gives the book the opportunity to explore new perspectives, something the author is not always successful with. Overall, I liked the story and the writing. The plot was reasonably well constructed, but the characters sometimes seemed uneven, inconsistent. For example, Graver seemed like a loser at first, then a hero by the end of the book’s first quarter. Perhaps that’s her point: life in the West was harsh.

This is a tough one. I liked the overarching story, liked the characters, and loved the setting and history, but the writing style just didn't suit me. It felt oddly scattered, like it jumped too much. There were more than several times where I had to page back and forth to make sure that I didn't miss a page. I honestly feel like I am missing parts of the story that's how jumpy it was. When people were thinking about the past there was very little to signify that this was the past and that this was the present. Super confusing and just odd at times. I enjoyed this story overall but just wasn't sold enough to go looking for this author's other works.