McNulty’s facility for capturing all kinds of beauty, violence, tenderness and terror within that idiom never seems a stretch. All of this travel and trouble comes wrapped in a breezy Irish-American-Yankee vernacular. In between there’s a damp spring in Massachusetts and a brutal winter stuck inside an infamous Georgia POW camp. He lingers on fantastic descriptions of the natural world he has encountered, from the thick, ancient redwoods of California, to the fractured creeks of Tennessee. He pauses to offer folksy but powerful philosophies. He omits, forgets, leaps back and forth within his own history, but he tells a cracking good tale – a grand, gruelling adventure threaded finely through the chaos of war. McNulty’s rambling narration, looking back on these heady days, pulls you right in. The soul of the novel lies with this tentative family of orphans, trying to survive in a shattered, confused America that must nonetheless be their home, their land. A surprising development from the early chapters is that McNulty and Cole adopt an orphaned Sioux girl, whom they name Winona because her real name is too tricky to pronounce. But the bitter struggle against ‘Johnny Reb’ is mostly background to the human story that propels everything.
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