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.