NEWS of the WORLD (audiobook) by Paulette Jiles

 


Book originally published in 2016.
Audiobook published by Harper Audio.
Read by Grover Gardner.
Duration: 6 hours, 17 minutes.
Unabridged.

News of the World is a pretty simple book - on the surface. Set in 1870 Texas, a 70+ year-old veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War is asked to travel more than 300 miles to deliver a 10-year old girl to her extended family near San Antonio, Texas. When she was 6, she was adopted by the Kiowa after they killed immediate family in a frontier attack. Their journey starts in Wichita Falls (near the Oklahoma-Texas border) and faces a lot of difficulties. 

The author

Jefferson Kyle Kidd goes by the name Captain Kidd because that was his rank in the Mexican War, where he served as a messenger. That is appropriate since his true love is bringing news to others. He worked on newspapers, he owned newspapers, he edited newspapers and now he is out of the newspaper business completely due to post-Civil War Reconstruction rules. 

Kidd can't stay out of the game, though. Since he can't be a publisher or a writer of the news, he becomes a newscaster of sorts. He buys all of the current newspapers, finds articles that would be of interest to local communities and then charges a dime per person for a reading of the news. He avoids local news (Reconstruction era politics were every bit as divisive as our modern politics) and instead prefers to read articles about faraway places and modern discoveries. He prefers to expose his audiences to news of the wider world to local news. 

The girl, Johanna,  has very few memories of life before the Kiowa and a great deal of the book deals with Kidd and Johanna, how they work out a way of communicating and the bond that forms between them. There are various adventures and outrages along the way, but the heart of the book is these two strangers traveling on a very long trip together in a wagon.

And, it is a fantastic book.

Grover Gardner read this audiobook. Gardner is a prolific narrator of audiobooks. He has read well over 1,000 audiobooks and I tend to think of his voice as more of a folksy style and it works perfectly with this book.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. Highly recommended.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  NEWS of the WORLD (audiobook) by Paulette Jiles.

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