The Long Journey Home

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Treating readers to yet more meticulous historical detail, Coldsmith's (The Lost Band) latest lengthy yarn is a low-key and uninspiring kind of Native American Forrest Gump. After more than 35 western novels, Coldsmith continues to chart the adventures of peripheral characters who wander through history brushing arms with major figures (this time Olympic track star Jim Thorpe, Will Rogers and Theodore Roosevelt). John Buffalo is a Lakota Sioux sent to a government school as a young boy in the 1890s. Proud of his Native American heritage, he vows to outdo the white man at his own game. Although he is a bright student, John's real success comes as an athlete--he plays football, baseball and track, and dreams of competing in the Olympics and later becoming a coach. Racism, however, derails his Olympic hopes and disrupts his budding romance with a U.S. senator's daughter. John later becomes a horse trainer and actor with a traveling Wild West show, performing around the world. In the 1920s, he travels to Hollywood, where he works as an animal trainer for motion picture companies, but he is never fulfilled by any of these adventures--a return to his Indian heritage is all he desires. John is an agreeable, sympathetic character, but not a compelling one; he is portrayed as a frustrated talent trying to make an ordinary living. Coldsmith's sketches of Wild West shows, early Hollywood and the flu epidemic of 1918 are excellent, but John's minor and unexciting involvement is just a vehicle for a painstaking history lesson. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this engrossing historical novel, based on the life of Olympic great Jim Thorpe, young John Buffalo is sent to the Carlisle Indian School by a patron who believes he has Olympic potential but then exiled to a junior college when the patron's daughter becomes attracted to him. Nobody wants to give a coaching job to an Indian, so John works at a ranch until his talent for taming horses earns him a job with a Wild West show. Carlisle asks him to train Jim Thorpe for the Olympics, but no coaching job materializes after he helps Thorpe win. Each time a racial barrier prevents John from doing what he wants, he shrugs and simply does something else, drifting from one job to another, doing all of them well. His absence of control over his own life makes the book seem eerily plotless, but John's adventures in this vibrantly drawn historical period will keep readers engaged throughout. For larger historical fiction collections. Marylaine Block, Librarian Without Walls Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

From the Publisher

"Coldsmith is a master storyteller."-Publishers Weekly

"The Long Journey Home is the often sad, but nevertheless compelling story of [a Native American] who does his best to fit into his New World."-The Sunday Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

"[An] engrossing historical novel. . . . John's adventures in this vibrantly drawn historical period will keep readers engaged throughout."-Library Journal