Finished reading this new historical fantasy tonight, and here are some early impressions:
* I really liked the main character, Paha Sapa. He was intelligent, spiritually gifted, and gentle. If he had been born at a different time in history, he would have obviously been a great shaman/spiritual leader of the Lakota. I also greatly liked his wife and father-in-law. The absolute opposite of the loathsome Wilkie Collins main character from Drood.
* most of the Custer chapters made me feel dirty. I usually do not have trouble with sex in books (other than graphic rape scenes which are
disgusting and disturbing to me) but these just seemed really...private...and made me feel like I was secretly spying on a married couple's most intimate moments.* I wish the author had dialed back a bit on some of the more racist aspects of the story. In particular the point where the main character discovered that white society had various tribes and then he names some of them with ethnic slurs including the n word. I would rather read a book filled with f bombs than the n word. Yes, I know these slurs were being used in a historically accurate way, and people really did used to speak that way. But we (at least most of us) no longer speak in such a way currently, and today those words are filthy in a way mere curses and expletives are not. I can grudgingly tolerate those words in a book written back in those times (especially in a book that takes a strong stand against racism like Huckleberry Finn) but expect better of today's authors. I think that most people educated well enough to read and understand the history behind the story are well aware of the shameful racism of America's past without those ethnic slur words being rubbed against our noses.
* I enjoyed reading about the building of such famous things as the Brooklyn Bridge and Mount Rushmore, and it is obvious that Simmons researched the heck out of the lifestyle and customs of the Lakota both before and after they were penned up in reservations, and those sections of the book were also very interesting, as was the Dust Bowl section.
Earlier in the book it was much more tightly woven. 