News of the World (Questions)

1. Discuss Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s work as a newspaper reader. What does he bring to his audience, and what does he gain from his work besides financial compensation?

2. Why does Kidd accept the difficult job of returning Johanna home? What drives him to complete the job despite the danger and obstacles?

3. Why do you think Johanna wants to stay with her Kiowa family? What do you think she remembers of her life before she was taken?

4. What connects Kidd to Johanna? Why does she seem to trust him so easily?

5. What does Kidd worry may become of Johanna once she’s returned to her family? What does he know of the fate of other “returned captives”?

6. Doris Dillion says that Johanna is “carried away on the flood of the world...not real and not not-real.” She describes her as having “been through two creations” and “forever falling.” Do you agree with her assessment? Does Johanna remain this way through the course of the novel?

7. Discuss the various tensions in the novel: Indians and whites; soldiers and civilizations; America’s recent past and its unsure future. In what ways do these tensions underlie the story of Kidd and Johanna?

8. Imagine the perspective of Johanna’s Kiowa family. Why, do you think, they would’ve taken her in and raise her? Why would they give her up? How do you think they felt when they let her go?

9. Discuss the troubling moment when Johanna wanted to scalp her fallen enemy. How did that make you feel about her?

10. Partway through his journey with Johanna, Kidd feels as though he was “drawn back into the stream of being because there was once again life in his

hands.” What do you think this means? What does it tell you about Kidd’s emotional life?

11. What is the significance of the line, “The bones of the Kiowa warriors did not lie in the earth but in the stories of their lives, told and retold – their bravery and daring, the death of Britt Johnson and his men, and Cicada, the little girl taken from the by the Indian Agent, Three Spotted’s little blue-eyed girl”?

12. Where in the novel does the title appear? Does it have significance beyond the literal?

13. What is the primary draw for you about this story: the setting, the bond of characters, the journey?

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News of the World (About the Author)

• Birth—1943

• Where—Salem, Missouri, USA

• Education—B.A., University of Missouri

• Currently—lives near San Antonio, Texas

Poet, memoirist, and novelist Paulette Jiles was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and moved to Canada in 1969 after graduating with a degree in Romance languages from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

She spent eight years as a journalist in Canada, before turning to writing poetry. In 1984, she won the Governor General's Award (Canada's highest literary honor) for Celestial Navigation, a collection of poems lauded by the Toronto Star as "...fiercely interior and ironic, with images that can mow the reader down."

In 1992, Jiles published Cousins, a beguiling memoir that interweaves adventure and romance into a search for her family roots. Ten years later, she made her fiction debut with Enemy Women (2002), the survival story of an 18-year-old woman caged with the criminally insane in a St. Louis prison during the Civil War. Janet Maslin raved in the New York Times, "This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence by an author determined to capture the immediacy of the heroine's wartime odyssey." The book won the Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction (U.S.) and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (Canada).

In her second novel, 2007's Stormy Weather, Jiles mined another rich trove of American history. Set in Texas oil country during the Great Depression, the story traces the lives of four women, a widow and her three daughters, as they struggle to hold farm and family together in a hardscrabble world of dust storms, despair,

and deprivation. In its review, the Washington Post praised the author's lyrical prose, citing descriptions that "crackle with excitement."

A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Jiles currently lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.

Extras

From a 2007 Barnes & Noble interview:

• When I lived in Nelson, British Columbia, there were three or four of us women who were struggling writers; we were very poor and we had a great deal of fun. We shared writing and money and wine. Woody (Caroline Woodward) had a great, huge Volkswagen bug—green—named Greena Garbo. When any of us managed to publish something there were celebrations. It was a wonderful time. They always managed to show up at my place just when I'd baked bread. One time Meagan and Joanie arrived to share with me a horrible dinner they had made of cracked wheat and onions—we were actually all short of food. I had just made lasagna—and they ate all of my lasagna and left me with that vile dish of groats and onions. And then we all got married and went in different directions.

• I have a small ranch that keeps me busy—two horses, a donkey, a cat, a dog, fences, a pasture—I and spend lots of time preventing erosion, clearing cedar, etc.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye gives a clear and cogent analysis of the various sorts of imaginative narratives, among them the quest story. It does not assign value to any one type of story. I came upon Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic in college and loved it. It has the same sort of descriptive brilliance as Anatomy. It was a relief from the contemporary insistence that only the novel of psychological exploration was of literary value." https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/10763-news-of-world-jiles?start=1

News of the World (Reviews)

This Western is not to be missed by Jiles's fans and lovers of Texan historical fiction. The final chapter's solid resolution will satisfy those who like to know what ultimately becomes of beloved characters. —Wendy W. Paige, Shelby Cty. P.L., Morristown, IN

Library Journal

In post-Civil War Texas, a 10-year-old girl makes an odyssey back to her aunt and uncle's home after living with the Kiowa warriors who had killed her parents four years earlier.... Lyrical and affecting, the novel succeeds in skirting clichés through its empathy and through the depth of its major characters.

Kirkus Reviews

“News of the World” is a narrow but exquisite book about the joys of freedom (experienced even by a raging river threatening to overrun its banks); the discovery of unexpected, proprietary love between two people who have never experienced anything like it; pure adventure in the wilds of an untamed Texas; and the reconciling of vastly different cultures (as when Kidd has to explain to Johanna, who is all set to collect a white man’s scalp, that this “is considered very impolite” and simply isn’t done). That’s a lot to pack into a short (213 pages), vigorous volume, but Ms. Jiles is capable of saying a lot in few words.

The New York Times

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