Bohemian Girl

July 18, 2011
At the onset of the Civil War, in "the Christian Year of Our Lord 1861," a 12-year-old girl meets a bitter fate when her father loans her to an elderly Pawnee Indian to settle a debt. That the debt came from losing a foot race to the mouth of a river "too thick to drink, too thin to plow" only makes matters worse. The girl joins other slaves and indentured servants who do an Indian Mound builder's work, spending their days hobbled, crafting heaps of sand, clay, and bone. But when she realizes that the Indian has no intention of releasing her as promised, she frees herself from her rawhide ties and heads east in search of her family. Calling herself Harriet, she narrates her grim odyssey in a poetic, convincing, but relentless voice. Still, Harriet's observations of the world and her small place in it are insightful and often touching. And Svoboda (Trailer Girl and Other Stories) often displays a poet's touch with language and imagery. Part of the University of Nebraska's Flyover Fiction series, edited by Ron Hansen.

September 1, 2011

Enslaved to an Indian to settle her father's gambling debt, a young girl escapes and makes her own way in mid-19th-century Nebraska.

Poet and author Svoboda (Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, 2008, etc.) has an elliptical prose style that makes demands some will find irksome. Those willing to stick with her tough, resourceful narrator, however, will be rewarded by an unsentimental picaresque recalling True Grit in its matter-of-fact portrait of a harsh society that mirrors the West's vast, indifferent landscape. True Grit's Mattie Ross is a creampuff compared to 12-year-old Harriet, who doesn't tell us her real name but assumes the sobriquet of a fellow captive who killed herself. Tied to a tree and temporarily saved from being burned alive when her dancing brings rain, Harriet manages to slip her bonds and limps off (she's been hobbled to prevent flight) to find her Pa. She acquires a baby whose family has been struck by lightning and winds up in a town being looted by soldiers—no one knows from which side, since the chaotic first year of the Civil War has given rise to armed bands of no particular allegiance. Undaunted by seeing a shopkeeper shot dead at his door, Harriet starts selling his supplies, telling the townsfolk she is his niece and has just arrived with her orphaned cousin. Over the course of the war, she establishes herself as a canny businesswoman while facing down with aplomb such threats as the arrivals of a peddler who knew her as a captive and of her crazy Indian captor. She acquires a suitor, damaged veteran Henry, who proves to have secrets of his own. Pa never shows up, and the baby who kept her from roaming farther to find him grows into a 13-year-old whose dreams are at odds with hers. Yet we never doubt Harriet will seize as much satisfaction as this hard life can spare.

Difficult, but worth it for a marvelous heroine with an iron will and a unique voice.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2011

Set at the beginning of the Civil War, Svoboda's fifth novel (after Pirate Talk or Mermalade) is told from the unusual perspective of Harriet, a young woman whose father has sold her into slavery to settle a gambling debt owed to a Native American obsessed with building a mound. After escaping captivity, she encounters a range of colorful individuals on the American frontier, her adventures recalling those of Huck and Jim in Twain's classic American novel. To protect herself, she eventually feigns the identity of a slain shopkeeper's niece and assumes ownership of his store while also pretending to be the mother of an abandoned child. VERDICT In this nod to Willa Cather's My Antonia, Svoboda offers a brave and believable heroine who not only perseveres but thrives amid strange characters and harsh times. Her skill as a poet is evident in her descriptions of both emotional and physical landscapes. Recommended for all fiction readers.--Faye A. Chadwell, Oregon State Univ. Libs., Corvallis

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2011
Traded by her father to settle a bet, Harriet spends her childhood in slavery to a ragtag tribe of Pawnee whose leader is obsessed with creating earthen mounds laden with the bones of his human victims. Mere hours before she is to be burned at the stake to feed his crazed vision, Harriet escapes and ventures alone across an unknown and unforgiving landscape, constantly on the lookout for the father who abandoned her four years earlier. Briefly taking up with a family of sod busters, Harriet is burdened with their newborn son after the parents are killed in a freak storm. As she strikes out on her own with the boy, Harriet makes her way to a small settlement where she ekes out a living as a shopkeeper, putting her in contact with the full panoply of drifters and grifters, soldiers and outlaws who are populating the new territory. Creating a western world as raucous and unpredictable as any imagined by Larry McMurtry, and teeming with characters as tragically heroic as those created by Willa Cather, Svoboda offers a vividly distinctive tale of the American frontier.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)