“Well, then, that’s so. What we see with our hearts
is often far truer than what we see with our eyes.”
Lurie Mattie is an orphan. While fleeing a marshal who has a warrant for
his arrest, he hides himself among a group of soldiers traveling west with a
herd of camels. Eventually he parts ways with this group but gains a new
traveling companion in Burke. Theirs is a journey of rivers which Lurie
chronicles by drops added to his canteen throughout the pages of Inland by
Meanwhile in the Arizona Territory, Nora and Emmett
Lark have been trying to subsist on a desert homestead by running a community
newspaper. They soon find themselves in the center of the controversy of where
the county seat should be established. As
the day of this novel unfolds, Nora slowly realizes that her husband and sons
have been caught up in the violence of this controversy. As she is trying to figure out their whereabouts,
Nora is also desperately trying to find water as their household is literally
down to the last dipperful. Adding to the chaos is the appearance of a
mysterious beast which only the most unreliable members of her household have
claimed to see.
Having just been charmed by Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, I was delighted to find
similar twists of magical realism, tenacity, and humor in her latest work.
“ 'Where in all of Christendom did you get a camel?’
she said. ‘Texas.’ There was no truer answer.”
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