Night Birds [ハードカバー]

This is a well researched, and excellently written work that blends historical realities with the traditions of Ozark healers and native tribes of Minnesota. "The Night Birds" is full of passion and surprise, and the image evoked by the title gathers more meaning as the story progresses. The narrative follows several generations of European immigrants as they struggle to survive side by side with a band of Dakotas in the mid 1800's. Maltman blends historical reality with practical and spiritual reflection. This book leads the reader to reflect upon many of the issues we continue to address and struggle with today. Once you begin, you will not want to put this book down. When you finish, you will want to read it again.

Multi-generational story of a German family torn apart by the violence of the 1800's: slavery, Indian wars, and Mother nature that can be equally as brutal. Told in two time frames, the 1850's and the 1870's with each story tightly intertwined. Leaving Missouri after the father prints an anti-slavery article, the father and children and stepchildren head for the Minnesota frontier. The Dakota Indians are not unfriendly neighbors but fear, distrust, and misunderstandings plague everyday life until the Great Sioux War of 1962 tears everything apart.

The story centers on Hazel, a young girl, whose father has taught her of the "old ways" of healing and her effect on the family. Friendly with the Indians, Hazel is later captured and becomes the wife of a young Indian brave. After the Great War, Hazel becomes reunited with part of her extended family. The story is told from the viewpoint of Asa,a young man whose life is affected by Hazel's years later.

The writing in this novel is beautiful although brutal in the description of daily life on the unplowed frontier. Nature is not merely a background but an active force throughout the story. The characters of children, young mothers, soldiers, old Dakota Indians, and farmers are so clearly drawn. Life was unbelievably hard and cruel, but the human spirit although at times broken and equally as cruel can maintain a spark of belief and hope in something better. A remarkable novel of the frontier.

"The Night Birds" is told by Asa, a young boy born in Minnesota in 1862. A boy of unusual sensitivity to the plight of others, Asa once released prisoners from jail out of pity for their unhappiness. That act of kindness branded him as different in a harsh and unforgiving world.

"Night Birds" teeter-totters between the stories of German settlers and indigenous Dakota peoples in the Midwest -- and the plagues brought by white men along with the devastation of natural hunting and fishing grounds as well as the bloody struggles between abolitist vs. pro-slavery sentiments held by differing whites. Confrontation between the groups is violent and often deadly.

Maltown's long suite in this novel lies in his descriptions of the harshness of the unconquered land -- the hunting and trapping, the decimation of animals, the killing of thousands of crows, and of sky-darkening flights of passenger pigeons, a pack of wolves dismembering their prey, freezing rains,and people falling through river ice to face terrible deaths.

The story shifts back and forth in the telling between 1859 and 1876 sometimes distracts the drama provided by immediacy as it flashes back to provide historical substance, i.e., motivational attributes to the events leading up to the present (1876).

In these pages one experiences horror, e.g., we watch as a group of Indian children stone a settler boy, see them approach the stoning with some trepidation until the first blood is drawn, then leap in to the lust of killing, continuing to stone the settler boy long after his life is gone. We see that scenario repeated many times: pro-slavery forces against abolitionist, settlers against Indians, village and teepee, town and log cabin, burning, torturing, scalping, beheading.

One wants to be totally sympathetic to the members of this three-generational epic of German settlers in the land we know as the American Midwest, but that is not entirely possible given their roles in destroying the land and gernerally believing that the land was theirs to take simply because they were white and of European ancestry.

Maltman is at his best when describing the land of this continent and the abundance of life, animal as well as vegetable here. Unfortunately, Maltman's characters are often not over well-developed, some too good or too evil, cardboarded with no ready motive or history to help us sympathize with their behavior.

This book is recommended for all who want a better understanding of the second half of the nineteenth century in America's Midwest, a time and place not frequented enough by authors of historical fiction.

Finally, this book is also a story of love, both familial and forbidden, Indian and white -- and, one leaves this story in a better place for having learned more about yet another part of America's patchwork history.