Bones of Paradise: A Novel

Written by Jonis Agee

Narrated by Christina Traister

The award-winning author of The River Wife returns with a multigenerational family saga set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sand Hills in the years following the massacre at Wounded Knee—an ambitious tale of history, vengeance, race, guilt, betrayal, family, and belonging, filled with a vivid cast of characters shaped by violence, love, and a desperate loyalty to the land.

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.’s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.’s cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his teenage sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is revealed, exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future.

At the center of The Bones of Paradise are two remarkable women. Dulcinea, returned after bitter years of self-exile, yearns for redemption and the courage to mend her broken family and reclaim the land that is rightfully hers. Rose, scarred by the terrible slaughters that have decimated and dislocated her people, struggles to accept the death of her sister, Star, and refuses to rest until she is avenged.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of misfits, schemers, chancers, and dreamers, Jonis Agee’s bold novel is a panorama of America at the dawn of a new century. A beautiful evocation of this magnificent, blood-soaked land—its sweeping prairies, seas of golden grass, and sandy hills, all at the mercy of two unpredictable and terrifying forces, weather and lawlessness—and the durable men and women who dared to tame it. Intimate and epic, The Bones of Paradise is a remarkable achievement: a mystery, a tragedy, a romance, and an unflagging exploration of the beauty and brutality, tenderness and cruelty that defined the settling of the American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062445650

Jonis Agee

Jonis Agee has been praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape.” She is the award-winning author of twelve books, including the New York Times Notable Books of the Year Sweet Eyes and Strange Angels. Her awards include the John Gardner Fiction Award, the George Garrett Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in fiction, a Loft-McKnight Award, a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction, and two Nebraska Book Awards. A native of Nebraska, Agee teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Reviews for Bones of Paradise

[carolfoisset · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the historical aspects of this book and found some of the writing poetic and beautiful. Engaging characters and the setting is a character in itself. However, there were several times where the story seemed to veer off to a random conversation or idea right in the middle of a fairly involved passage. More than one time I checked to see if I had skipped a page because the flow seemed off and confused me. This is an ARC I've had for awhile and the first book I have read from this author, I did enjoy her writing enough to read another one of her books.

[pmaurer_11 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Novel set in Nebraska, that I should like but I don't. Tale of the twin deaths of a rancher and a young Native American woman, and the long-absent wife trying to solve the crime. Many ties to Wounded Knee, and early Nebraska history. Author uses wayyyyyyyyyy to many pronouns, making it hard to follow conversations.

[jepeters333 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee, JB Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on JB's land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of JB's family: his cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and teenage young sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is revealed - exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future.

[alphawoman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good story. Way too much description that bogs down story and adds little to the intense family struggle. 10 years after Wounded Knee secrets and mistrust abound. I love good cowboy Indian stories beginning with Little Big Man and most recent the Color of Lightening. This Was A Pleasant Surprise! She held no punches describing the massacre at Wounded Knee. I skimmed over the devastating details of the carnage.

[blbera · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

[The Bones of Paradise] is a sprawling historical Western set in the Nebraska Sand Hills at the end of the nineteenth century. In the opening pages, rancher J.B. Bennett is killed as he discovers the dead body of an Indian girl, setting in motion a struggle over the title of the land and a search for the killer.The Sand Hills are wonderfully evoked by Agee's descriptions: "A person had to keep his eye on the smallest detail while the vast emptiness constantly tugged at his vision. You can get lost in a heartbeat out here, he'd told his wife. It took him most of his life to realize the significance of his own words." Throughout the novel, we are treated to the sights, sounds, and smells of this hard place.But the novel isn't just about the challenges of ranching life; Agee also visits the massacre of the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, recognizing that many of the ranchers lived on land stolen from 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."Dulcinea Bennett, J.B.'s wife and Rose, the murdered Indian girl's sister, are strong women, great characters who work together to fight for their place in this unforgiving country generally considered a man's world, as well as to find the murderer of their loved ones.Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction with a strong sense of place.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Living in the sand hills of Nebraska takes a huge amount of determination, grit, and a love of the land. For Dulcinea and JB it was a place to ranch, raise a family and plan a future until it became instead a place where Dulcinea would loose her sons and run from her husband. There is of course a heartbreaking story behind this. She will return years later with plans to reclaim what was hers but will instead find her husband murdered and a young Indian woman alongside him. A man named Garvey, who has already lost his entire family to illness, will come upon them, almost losing his own life. Who are the killers? All the men suspected have one thing in common, they all were at the massacre of Wounded knee as were the dead.The author spares no descriptions, no words when relating this horrible massacre. It is vivid and graphic. It is horrific and will leave a legacy of revenge and hatred. This is a very grim story, for much of it there is only a glimmer of light, of hope but the story of these people is enthralling as well. Their lives are so hard, very much a life of survival as things in this area for ranching has not gone well. Oil and mineral prospectors are pressuring the ranchers to grant them the rights to their properties. Loved that this featured two incredibly strong women, Dulcimer who will after much heartache, show indeterminable and enviable strength and Rose, her Indian friend and also the sister of the murdered young Indian girl, who vows vengeance against the murderer. One get s good sense of the inner struggles of these two women and the struggles to tame this land as a whole. The last chapter provides a glimpse into the future and it is here we can see if their struggles will bear fruit. Quite a good and realistic story.

[nbmars · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a stunning book that I couldn’t stop reading, even though it included historical accounts of terrible evil and I didn’t like many of the protagonists, some of whom committed the most repugnant acts imaginable. But through alternating narrators, the author shows us the forces that drove these characters, and brings us to an understanding of the needs for either revenge or redemption that haunted them. It takes place in 1900 in the Nebraska Sandhills (measuring almost 20,000 miles, it is the largest sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere). The Sandhills then required constant management by cattle ranchers to ensure plants took root in the shifting sand to feed the herds. Starvation, disease, and death were all too common. (Today, three Sandhills counties are the top three beef cow counties in the U.S.)The story begins with the murder of J.B. Bennett, owner of a large ranch near the South Dakota border, and of Star, a young Lakota woman from the Pine Ridge Reservation, their bodies found together by the remote windmill on J.B.’s property. Their deaths bring a number of people to the Bennett farm to find out who murdered them and what they were doing together. Foremost among them are Dulcinea, J.B.’s estranged wife; Rose, Star’s sister; Drum, J.B.’s father and owner of the adjacent farm; J.B. and Dulcinea’s sons, Cullen and Hayward; and Ryland Graver, shot by someone unknown when he went to investigate the bodies.Their secrets unfold gradually, as the characters - both living and dead, circle each other and the truth. The writing is exceptional, as this example, when Dulcinea returns to the ranch and enters her old bedroom, and we get a hint of the relationship between J.B. and Dulcinea:“‘My God, how we are destroyed,’ she whispered, a line from some forgotten drama, or maybe she had written it in her head as she entered the room where she had slept with J.B. all those years ago. She had carried on an internal dialogue with her husband for so long that his death did not alter the conversation. It merely expanded across time and space.”Rose too communes with a ghost, in her case her dead sister,. Rose promises her she will find her killer and avenge her death, as well as the death of their mother, who was slaughtered in the Massacre at Wounded Knee ten years earlier. The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Soldiers - a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment, surrounded the peaceful encampment. The Lakota made the soldiers nervous by their performance of the “Ghost Dance,” a religious ceremony. In any event, the Seventh Cavalry wanted retribution for their defeat at Little Bighorn. As J.B. mused:“And when the Indians were finally blotted out, the Black Hills and all the reservation lands would be open for white settlement. … There was money to be made here.”On the morning of December 29, 1890, the young Lakota men once again began to dance. The elderly and sick were lying on the ground encouraging them, women were preparing food from meager provisions, and children were running and playing. The dancing gave the impoverished natives hope, but the soldiers thought it was a “scalp dance” and a provocation. The soldiers had spent the previous night drinking heavily, and that next morning, as a battery of four Hotchkiss mountain guns moved into position, the troops, some of whom were still drinking, attacked the Lakota encampment. More than 200 men, women, and children of the Lakota were killed and 51 were wounded (4 men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later). As the wounded fled, the soldiers pursued them to finish them off. Many of the women were raped before they were killed, and many of soldiers hacked off body parts to take as souvenirs. (At least twenty of the soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor.) When the carnage was over, surviving Lakota were "allowed" either to join Buffalo Bill’s show, go to prison, or go to Oklahoma where the tribes hated them.Almost all of the characters in this book were either involved in or impacted by what happened that day at Wounded Knee. But J.B., who was there and had been horrified, felt that serving as a witness would make no difference: “The true story was unthinkable, unheroic, so it was changed by the newspapers, the military, and the government.” Yet he knew what happened, and for the rest of his life it preyed upon him. His unexpected end, next to a Lakota girl who managed to hide during the attack only to be killed later, is only one of the network of tragedies and ironies of this book.This network is constructed in part by some excellent characterization, with the author adding surprising shades to characters that I never would have expected, and yet these switches from cruelty to compassion, or puissance to pathos, were done in such a way as to seem totally convincing. The breathtaking ending comes in a series of tragic waves that nevertheless eventually smooth out into a note of hope for the future. Discussion: This novel takes us back to a shameful and profoundly sad historic moment and provides richly-drawn characters to provide details of what happened. That story of the removal and genocide of native peoples, and of the internecine conflicts of greed among the conquerers, is yet woven today into the social and political landscape of the country. And in this book, it plays out not only in the characters’ pasts, but in their present and futures as well.Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote that “There is in all men a demand for the superlative,” but this book reminds us of our equally important potential for cruelty toward one another.Evaluation: I was unaware that this book would include details of the massacre at Wounded Knee because, chicken that I am, had I known I wouldn’t have read it. It hurts my heart to think about it, and it will hurt your heart to read this book. Nevertheless, this riveting and poignant story of settlement in the West by a gifted and award-winning author is well worth the journey. It would also make an excellent choice for book clubs.