"Jiles's prose is a striking match for the barren landscape of this moody adventure tale." -- Publishers Weekly on Lighthouse Island "Historical novels are by nature elegies. This is especially true of novels of the Old West, and never more so than in the form Cormac McCarthy has refined--call it the Poet's Western. Paulette Jiles, an accomplished poet as well as a novelist, lodges The Color of Lightning deep within this genre, packing her prose with inventive metaphor, luxuriant detail, and flights of fierce, austere poetry, as well as hymns to the Texas landscape. [Jiles's] roving omniscience gives the novel the breadth and busyness of a Diego Rivera mural . a gripping, deeply relevant book." -- New York Times Book Review on The Color of Lightning "Like Margaret Atwood's Offred (in The Handmaid's Tale), [protagonist] Nadia is a shrewd observer and chronicler of the broken world around her. Like Suzanne Collins's Katniss ( The Hunger Games ), she proves unflaggingly brave and skillful under fire.

Nadia's weapons, however, are those of charm and deceit. Jiles sketches our future with the comically skewed proportions of the hyperreal, reflecting a warped society as ridiculous as it is dangerous. Against that slick backdrop of consumption and vicious ladder-climbing, however, she frames quiet moments of human dignity and compassion. To Jiles, storytelling seems to lie at the core of human connection. Though post-modern authors have attempted to dismantle romantic notions of narrative, Lighthouse Island makes a bewitching case for their preservation. In a parched, austere world, stories are all we have to sate us." -- Kansas City Star on Lighthouse Island.