In his mesmerizing debut, The Beauty of the Days Gone By, Jason Stone brings the post-Civil War frontier to brutal yet ephemeral life, capturing the clash between white Texas settlers and the Kiowa and Comanche. Deeply researched, the novel is based on the life of legendary cattleman Charles Goodnight and his associates who helped "tame" the sprawling area of West Texas known as Comancheria.
Spanning two eras, the story begins in 1866 with former Texas Ranger RL Terry returning to his burnt-out ranch; his two boys have been taken by a Kiowa war party, and his wife dies in his arms. The other timeline, in the 1920s, sees the nonagenarian Goodnight unspooling his life to a university historian, J Evetts Haley (his real-life biographer). Over 400-plus pages, RL tracks across the Comancheria searching for his sons, while his eldest, Sam, accepts assimilation into the Comanche tribe under the approving eye of chief Quanah Parker. Stone expertly weaves the competing arcs into a propulsive narrative full of mellifluous sentences and unpunctuated dialogue that resembles oral storytelling around a campfire. It all leads to a final confrontation between Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne warriors and Texans in 1874, and the revelation of a long-held secret by Goodnight in 1929. The Beauty of the Days Gone By is an ambitious and gorgeously written tale about survival, redemption, and how memory can shape the past just as much as the future. --Peggy Kurkowski, freelance book reviewer in Denver