Bones of Paradise audiobook

In the hills grudges never died, they remained as they took place, as the words were uttered, since there was nowhere for them to go, nothing to break them apart, the soft edges of the hills offered nothing hard enough to smash the anger, nothing sharp enough to cut through the Gordian knot, so it lived fresh, undeniable as the first day. In the hills there were only first days, no history. Nothing was allowed to die. They marked time by the growing list of wrongs until its weight pulled them under and they vanished, smothered with the breath of sand in their mouths. X-Ray heaven and you may not like what you see in the underyling structure. The wind blows hard and always in the Sand Hills region of Nebraska. Disturb the soil, even a little, say by planting anything other than grass, and that soil will catch the next gust on out of there. Not exactly a farming Shangri-la. And tough on cattlemen too, as big bovines have been known to trample the life out of a place, given the chance. Makes for a hard life. Calls for hard people. But where is the line between tough and ornery, strong and cruel, determined and murderous? Where is the line between being attached to the land and being nailed to it? Jonis Agee Circa 1900, rancher J.B. Bennett was straddling that line, 20,000 acres, cattle, employing more than a couple of men, and struggling, always struggling. The land gave up its bounty grudgingly. Almost as tight-fisted as Bennett’s hard-hearted father, Drum, proud owner of the adjacent spread, and a dark force as sand-blastingly abrasive as the incessant wind. But JB won’t have to worry about the land or the sand for long. Moments after he finds a dead Lakota girl, while inspecting his property, a familiar face (“Oh, it’s you—“) appears, fires once, and sends JB to a wind and sand free realm. Thus opens the central pair of mysteries that constitute one of the major elements of Jonis Agee’s latest novel. As with her award-winning The River Wife, Agee (a distant relation of James Agee) offers a fictional look at a trying time in American history, and a trying place. Unraveling the whos and the whys of the twin-killings drives the narrative.When JB met his unexpected end, he had been thinking about his wife of twenty years, Dulcinea. They had had a major falling out ten years earlier and she had been away from the ranch for the duration. Which brings us to story elements two and three. You may recall that Odysseus wandered the planet for ten years after the end of the Trojan War before finding his way home. When Dulcinea refers to one of her sons as her Telemachus, it is pretty clear, if it wasn’t already, that there is some classical referencing afoot, albeit with Penelope in the role of wanderer this time. Don’t go looking for a one-to-one equivalence. The two stories are quite different. But it can be satisfying to pick out the refs as they pop up. A crowd of suitors is another nod to Homer. The more important item here, though, is the character of Dulcinia. She is the heart of the story. She may face more danger at home than she did on the road and the question is whether she can survive the sundry local threats, natural and not. Alienated from her children, Cullen and Hayward, now teenagers, she wants back in, and, having inherited her husband’s land, she will do everything in her power to re-establish a home, and family. Drum would like nothing more than to see her dead, or at the very least gone. And there are other forces allied against her as well. Does she have the strength, the character, the smarts to find truth and make things right, or will she succumb? It is not only JB’s death that requires investigation. The young Lakota was killed for a reason, and it falls to her sister, Rose, close friend to Dulcinea, to look into her murder. God knows local law enforcement won’t. The underlying force here is a large one. In 1890 there was a huge gathering of native people at Pine Ridge in what is now South Dakota, not far from the Sand Hills. It was ostensibly a religious event, a mass Ghost Dance meant to bring about the restoration of native hunting grounds and removal of white invaders, through spiritual means. Instead, the US Army surrounded the encampment and, whether through accident or intent, shooting erupted, at the end of which as many as three hundred Native American men, women and children, mostly unarmed, had been slaughtered. Rose and her sister had been present, as had some of the other characters in this tale. The echoes of events from that disgraceful day resound over the years to drive not only Rose and her sister, but some of the residents of the Sand Hills as well. Agee has woven Drum Bennett’s drive to consolidate his family’s holdings, whatever it takes, Dulcinea’s drive to reconstitute her family, make her late husband’s ranch productive again, while looking for his killer, and the chilly wind of history that blows across the sand from the Wounded Knee massacre into a compelling, heart-wrenching story.She offers attention as well to Dulcinea’s two lost boys. Cullen and Hayward (Cain and Abel?), gives us some history on how JB and Dulcinea came together and fell apart, gives us insight into the perspective of the victims of Wounded Knee, living and dead. There is a local farmer, a living testament to the unforgiving nature of the land, with an appropriate name, Graver, who gets caught up in the Bennett family drama. There is clearly a connection made between him and Dulce. Trust is established, and more, but Agee shows good sense in keeping it from playing too large a part in the tale.Agee’s love of the land is palpable. It may be harsh and less than bountiful in the usual sense, but there is something about the hardness that clearly makes her love it even more, and appreciate the beauty it has to offer. for a short, lovely time she believed that her life, their life, meant this place and what they did here, what they learned by living and loving each other. It was because she still felt him here, J.B., he touched her, and nothing could change this place, this land...It was how she understood the Indians…who mourned the land, not as wealth, but as the place where all was alive, all living, in one form or another. The whites took it but the dead still walked it, the spirits, whatever they were. Her faith had removed God, dispersed him like seed or gravel. It was not that God didn’t exist. It was that he wasn’t alone, but in pieces, parts, always whole, sufficient, always multiple. So like the ancient Greeks she trod lightly, carefully, tried to give no offense to the land, the sacred grass her feet crushed, the ants hurriedly preparing caverns for the winter, pushing tiny yellow boulders out of a hole the size of a bee’s leg. Oh the offence, to walk so clumsily through the world, to crush and bring havoc, that they couldn’t help. But to give no recognition to the cost of their being alive, to the price paid for their dreams by everything else? I had two small gripes about the book. My ARE copy comes in at 416 pages, a very reasonable length for a novel that covers as much territory as this one does. I was enrapt for most of the read. But I did feel that there was a sag towards the back end, before the finale. The other was that after a significant death, a whole host of characters head into town for a rodeo. I have no idea if this would have been usual behavior at the time, but it felt to my 21st century sensibility too soon after the loss for such an outing. This Sand Hills paradise may be a bit more bone than apple, but it clearly possesses its own serpents, its own angry deity and more than its share of castings out. Linking to another myth, a weary wanderer comes home after a long odyssey to find a bloody mess much in need of repair. It may not be Ithaca, but it is a kingdom nonetheless, and needs ruling. Set in a harsh American landscape, Agee brings to life visions of struggle. Fathers versus sons. Men versus women, whites versus natives, and the land versus everyone. There is no point if there is no hope, if there is only struggle. Many thought the land offered a new Eden, and certainly this spanse of promised land was not up to making good that utopian dream. But still, one could scratch out a living, if the elements were not too unkind. One could try to fix what had been broken. One could try to find out truths and attempt to right at least some wrongs. The Bones of Paradise offers enough light to keep us moving through the darkness, enough twists to keep us from going in too-straight a path, enough knowledge to make snatching that apple seem a worthwhile proposition, and enough satisfaction to make the journey through Agee’s pages rewarding. There may or may not be a paradise in store for you or me, but The Bones of Paradise offers readers a little bit of nirvana right here on earth.Review posted – 1/1/2016Publication date – 8/2/16=============================EXTRA STUFFThe author’s personal websiteA nice wiki on the authorA look at the Nebraska Sand HillsThe wiki on Wounded Knee Massacre is pretty goodAn interesting piece on The Ghost Dance

My God, how we are destroyedman, this is one meaty book. and it took me forever to read. not because it was boring; it's not that at all. it's just that it moves at a slow, deliberate pace and there are a lot of storylines to absorb, where each character is given their own manifest destiny-style room to expand and develop. the characters are particularly well-written here; at first there are good guys and bad guys (where "guys" is a gender-neutral term) and questionable decisions made by all, but by the end of the book, the reader has learned enough about these characters that distinctions like "good" and "bad" collapse into "human," which is ultimately what you want in literary fiction. but it's not literary fiction that's being a dick about it - it's not intellectually taxing for readers who enjoy books that take their time to unfold and have a number of strong characters driving the narrative. if you have a book club with members willing to dive into a book this size and speed, it's perfect for discussion, and it's a good mix of genres: historical fiction, family saga, mystery, western and an equally good mix of themes - race and gender and family and historical atrocities and the struggle to exist in a world where nature and man are equally cruel.The roads to the Black Hills gold were strewn with with skeletons of horses and mules and oxen driven to death in the mad hurry to reach men's destiny. Furniture discarded, empty barrels, crates of clothing and mementos, even toys left behind once the babe itself was gone. It was a hard land for those without patience. Time ruled this land, and in time everyone was wounded, and everything of value disappeared.it's got all the best parts of the western: slow-burning vengeance, stubborn perseverance, lawlessness, savage violence, moral flexibility, the pursuit of gold and oil, hardship, and an absence of community - these are men and women hardened by their own struggle to carve out a fragile existence in an unpredictable environment; deceptively beautiful natural landscapes that can turn in an instant, bringing cyclones, drought, and blizzards that can destroy everything in their wake, where a family can just starve to death and no one will help. or rather - the only man willing to help gets murdered on page 11, on his own land, beside the still-warm body of a murdered lakota girl.cue the mystery elements. there's the big mystery: the double murder that opens the book as well as the maybe-attempted-murder of the character who discovers the bodies, but the murders actually take a back seat - they spur the action and flavor the rest of the book, but several smaller scale mini-mysteries get in the way - family secrets, arrangements, and estrangements, shady land dealings, contested wills, suspicious characters, and the looming shadow of the memory of the massacre at wounded knee, which links several characters in shame or outrage.the book scoots back and forth through time, and includes the massacre (which is absolutely horrifying. well-written, but gutting), as well as events leading up to and following the event. and all of the questions will be answered, although some of them will be answered without fanfare, quietly inserted in casual, "blink and you'd miss 'em" ways. which i love.i've barely scratched the surface in this meandering review - that's how much there is to this one. but i will say it's a stunning book, and it lingers. it is very much worth the time it will take you to digest it. He had to keep going, if for no other reason than the hope that the work would kill him and it would all be over.i promise it will not kill you.come to my blog!

I'm not a fan of mysteries or crime stories, but I am a big fan of family sagas and historical fiction so it was this part of the book description that piqued my interest. It takes place in the Sand Hills of Nebraska in 1900, a decade after the horrific and shameful event in American history , the massacre at Wounded Knee. While time has passed, what happened at Wounded Knee is ever present in the flashbacks, in the thoughts of a slimy character who took part in it, but most of all in the heart and soul of Rose, a native Lakota Indian, one of the strong women depicted here. It is most eloquently told in the words of the spirit of her dead sister Star.It's also the story of the Bennett family - Drum Bennett, the dictatorial, heartless father who will only give land to his son J.B Bennett for a dear price that separates him from a son and his wife Dulcinea. It is Dulcinea who ultimately tries to pick up the pieces of this broken family. The past, the family secrets are slowly divulged. While finding the murderer who kills two people at the beginning was central to the story, there is so much more. It's bursting with history of the time and place . It's heartbreaking and sickening as the massacre at Wounded Knee is described. It's filled with hatred and love, with the vile greed of some as well as goodness of others . I'm glad that I didn't let the murder mystery part of this story keep me from reading it . Thanks to William Morrow/HarperCollins and Edelweiss.

I’m not generally a reader of mysteries, and frankly, I’m not sure this novel can be billed as one. It is a fabulous conglomerate: a family saga, literary fiction, historical fiction, a love story, a western, and a mystery all wrapped into one.Admittedly, the mystery component of ‘what really happened to JB and Star that fateful day?’ (no spoilers here) kept me turning pages. But what kept me the most rapt was that this novel is told almost exclusively by what ISN’T being said between characters. Jonis Agee’s ability to show intention, thought, and emotion through facial expressions, gestures, and body language is unmatched. I’m still floored. These characters are painfully flawed and have been wronged and hurt and hurt some more. I could see these people twitch their eyes, hear the breath come from their troubled lips, feel their hesitation and heaviness of heart. Not only that, the author knows horses, and you will know them, too, by the end of this tale: how gentle and ornery and smart they are; how much finesse is required for human-horse trust. And for that matter, the author understands, intimately, the complexities of human-to-human interaction.Agee’s descriptions of the stark landscape and the theme of humans’ quest for land were both so emotionally taut. And then, of course, the horrors of Wounded Knee are central to this book (I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee as a college student and still shiver thinking about it). This book does such an incredible job of questioning that slippery definition of ‘history,’ based on which ‘side’ is telling the story. The novel sheds some ugly truths about this period in American history that, again, should be required reading for us all.This is a story about mothers and sons, sons and fathers, ambition, greed, desire, the power of evil, the value of hard work. Rich in historical detail, and its own moments of breathtaking beauty, this is a wonderful character-driven novel that will hold you in its grip long after you’ve turned the last page. Love literary historical fiction? This one’s for you.

I loved the historical aspects of this book. The massacre at Wounded Knee was both fascinating and horrible to read about. It's so disturbing what people can do to each other. I found myself also frustrated at Dulcinea and her actions or lack thereof. What mother lets her child be taken from her and does not spend every minute trying to get them back? What kind of mother leaves her children? I realize times were different back then, but it still makes me want to smack someone. Overall, I liked this book.

There are not that many novels written about the Nebraska Sandhills which is a quite unique limited geographic area of the USA. This is where my maternal ancestors settled which is why this caught my interest, but the book itself will keep anyone's interest if they are drawn to topics related to settling the West and the treatment of Native Americans.Dulcinea is a wonderfully strong female character who must face off against a number of powerful men in order to lay claim to the ranch that her husband left her. Dealing with child abuse, extremely hard working conditions, a murder investigation, and general skulduggery, she struggles to get her two teen sons to trust and respect her while also being drawn to a man who may just touch her heart.But this is not just about a settler family. This is ALL about the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee and I admit that I learned terrible things about this event that has always been referred to but not exactly explained. Here, a white man provides an eye witness account of the ghost dances and the atmosphere leading up to the horrible crime resulting in a mass grave of mainly women and children. This was about greed as it opened up the lands for development and a wave of white settlers soon descended upon this harsh part of the country, including my own great grandparents.Since my mother grew up in this area in the 1930s, much of the book rings true. Wide open lands, the general fear of Native Americans, the Indian Schools where their culture was un-taught, books were precious because of their rarity, harsh weather, and very hard work.There is a murder mystery, but it is clear pretty early on who the culprit is. Readers will probably want to shake Dulcinea and her now-dead husband J.B. for letting their sons down. Plot probably could have been shortened a bit. All that said, this is a fine and illuminating read.

I'm a prairie girl at heart and don't know much about cattle or ranch life, but this entire book is a love letter to the land that makes up the heart of Nebraska and the various peoples who have lived on it. It's also a mystery and a who-done-it and lesson on real history and a story of family drama and female empowerment in a man's world. I loved it.

This book was the first western murder mystery and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. Agee knows how to keep the reader on their toes and spin a tale that makes you really fall for the characters.

Bones of Paradise has a lot going for it. Set in the backdrop of the harsh 1800’s Nebraska Sand Hills, it is a western, family saga, and mystery all in one. ” J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman” are found murdered on the Bennett property. J.B.’s wife, Dulcinea who had left years ago returns after his death with her friend, Rose who is also Star’s sister. They both intend to find out who is responsible for their loved ones death. Then there is J.B.’s vicious father, Drum Bennett who ran Dulcinea off, so long ago and her two sons, nearly adults. Mix in the hired hands and a wide cast of characters and it makes for an interesting story.The Nebraska landscape is also a central character to the story as is the massacre at Wounded Knee, from flashbacks.I found the novel dragged quite a bit for the first 60 pages but as the story and back story started to unfold, it picked up. The writing is poetic and at times, hypnotic. I have never read anything by Jonis Agee before this but hope to read more of her work in the future. Recommended.I received the ebook version for my honest review.

This author knows Nebraska! If you want to feel and experience the beauty and wildness of the Sandhills without traveling to the middle of America just read this book and soak in the descriptions of the land. This is a story that will grab you because of the historical references to the massacre at Wounded Knee, the relationships of the characters and the nature and animals. Jonis Agee describes in perfect detail a horse going down, a flock of red winged black birds, the motion of Cowboys working cattle. Im sure she was as diligent in her research of the historical details that makes this an exquisite book of Nebraska. I listened to the audio book and that is one of the reasons for only a 4 star rating. The narrator had every character speak in this unnatural monotone that was ridiculous and became annoying. Also the storyline that the mother left both her children for some threat by a crazy old man is pretty unbelievable. I would read this book for the beautiful descriptions of Nebraska and the historical facts. Forget about listening to it unless you can put up with poor narration.

Riveting, brutal, and deeply powerful, this is the story of two families - one Lakota, one white - and the tragedy that links them. Agee has crafted a masterpiece with a plot that's as winding as her lyrical sentences. This story of vengeance, guilt, love, and betrayal is set ten years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the characters are as scarred as the land in which they dwell. I can't recommend this highly enough.Read my full review at https://loveonlit.wordpress.com/2016/...

This is a remarkable well written story that any history buff would enjoy, and should read. This is a history -mystery -western set on a family ranch in Nebraska. This story is written in wonderful descriptive detail that makes it such an interesting read, and quite different than you would expect. Jonis Agee paints a beautiful picture in her story one that is hard to put down a mystery to the end. I received my book from Goodreads Giveaways and William Morrow, thank you for this book.