Family 
 Scarcely more than a novella, really, Paulette Jiles' short novel is beautiful through and through. A love story, that's what it is: the love of an elderly man for a little girl young enough to be his granddaughter, love of a way of life, and love of the unspoiled landscape of central Texas. 
 In the years after the Civil War, Captain Kidd, widowed veteran of many wars from 1812 on, sells his printing business in San Antonio, buys a horse, and starts to travel in the north and west of the state. He makes his money by giving public readings from newspapers for a dime a head, keeping clear of contentious local affairs but bringing his audience tales of modern developments out east and strange customs in more distant lands. One night, after a reading at Wichita Falls on the border with what is now Oklahoma, he is asked to escort a ten-year-old girl, Johanna, back to her uncle and aunt in Castroville, just west of San Antonio. For over four years, Johanna has been living with the Kiowa Indians, who captured her when they killed her parents. The Kiowa have become her family, her philosophy, her ways, and her language; she is a wild thing, devastated by being removed from all she knows. 
 Still, Kidd takes her on, using the ransom money to buy a wagon in which they travel via Spanish Fort, Dallas, and Lampasas, through the Hill Country to Fredericksburg and thence south towards San Antonio. It is a beautiful trip, but a dangerous one, and Kidd must be on the lookout for highway robbers, Indian raiders, and men looking to kidnap the girl for immoral purposes. But despite his seventy-plus years, the Captain is a skilled veteran, and Johanna has not been raised in a tribe of warriors for nothing. As the dangers they endure together deepen their trust in each other, that trust turns slowly into love. Kidd, whose wife has died and whose own family is dispersed out east, comes to dread the time when he must hand Johanna over to her uncle and aunt. Paulette Jiles handles this moment with sensitivity too, and a moral rightness, though I found myself wishing for something even more radiant than what had gone before. But perhaps I had been spoiled by passages of such sheer beauty as this one, where Kidd comes upon the shell of a farmhouse burned out by raiders: 
 Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he has been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of the evening. The shade of the Devil's trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sunlight falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one's father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work. Your heart melted sweetly, it slowed, lost its edges. Horses, horses. All gone in the burning.