SOURCE: “Up from Slavery,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 5, 1998, p. 4.

In the following review, McAlpin lauds Smiley for how she deals with both personal relationships and complex political ideas in The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

Why the current fascination among novelists with the years bracketing the Civil War? Could it be fallout from Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary? The allure of a powerful moral issue set against the backdrop of compelling drama? Last year brought us Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, a prizewinning epic about a wounded Confederate soldier's trek home to his beloved, and this year we have Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter, about the abolitionist crusader John Brown. And now, four years after her own Pulitzer Prize winner, A Thousand Acres, comes Jane Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. A confluence of factors in mid-19th century Kansas—plucky pioneers with...