Kimball's techniques in this novel are rich and complex, his style a wide register of oral tale telling put unerringly to paper.

Part of his story is a heightened comic celebration of terrible suffering and disasters and courage, seen especially in the stories of the Ole Woman and her children, in particular Brother and Will. Kimball encases an epic theme of the displacement of one elaborate, rich, and ancient social and economic order with another one by an invading force of Europeans from the east and the Africans, brought in chains to America and now freed after the Civil War. A concurrent part of Kimball's story comprises an elegy, a long lament for the destruction of the great Indian horse-andbuffalo cultures of the Great Plains. This "long tale" is told in episodic sequences from the points of view of several major characters who sometimes speak in their own...