NEWS OF THE WORLD (Paulette Jiles) - February 6/21

 This erratic yet ultimately rewarding book admittedly did test my patience here and there, as Jiles' Cormac McCarthy-like prose is occasionally a little on the impenetrable side. (There are some egregiously descriptive passages here, for sure.) But the author does a solid job of establishing the central characters and their increasingly compelling bond, and it's clear, too, that there are a handful of genuinely exciting/tense sequences. I even got a little choked up after Kidd took Johanna back from her adoptive family and eventually gave her away to be married. (The Six Feet Under-like final stretch is quite well done, certainly.) *** out of ****