BookBrowse Reviews Chenneville by Paulette Jiles

Reading Paulette Jiles' revenge western Chenneville, it's easy to remember she's a poet. She plays with language, painting her characters and scenery in vivid color. The story follows a former Union soldier named John Chenneville as he searches for revenge and his memories, narrated in Jiles' lush prose.

He wakes in a Virginia army hospital in 1865, suffering from a head wound and amnesia. After months recovering, John is finally released home to Missouri. But it's hard to remember who he was before. Fragments of feeling return first, "unbidden and intensely real."

"Ghosts of a memory, impressions. His brain had gone back to the basics, remembering and re-remembering. This is truly what we are to each other: a shape, a feeling, phantoms of love or threat of laughter, those who are lucid and speak in a strange old archaic French and smell of well-worn wool, of tobacco, of apples and...