In Calamity's Wake
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Miette has no desire to meet the mother who discarded her, a woman she knows only as an infamous soldier, drinker, and exhibition shooter: Martha Canary, made notorious as Calamity Jane. But Miette's beloved adoptive father makes a deathbed request that the two be reunited: "You have to do it . . . Promise me you will not change your mind. I know that you've heard sickening things and those things are all true but I'm sure she wants to know you."
Keen to honor her father's wishes, Miette traverses the Badlands of the North American West, searching for her mother across a landscape occupied by strangers, ghosts, and animals. On her journey she meets an old lover of her father's, a man who claims to be her brother, an imposter she thinks is her mother, the Negro minstrel Lew Spencer, a kind madam who is her mother's best friend, a wolf who longs to protect her, and many others.
Woven into Miette's journey are the stories of Jane as told in legends, history books, and dime store novels; by her friends and enemies; and by the woman herself. The many ephemeral truths of these tales come together and Miette must decide whether to forgive the woman who had forsaken her for a life of danger and adventure. In Calamity's Wake vividly recalls one of the most colorful icons in America's history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On his deathbed, Miette promises her adoptive father that she will seek out her mother, the notorious western legend Calamity Jane. What follows is a dark and thrilling adventure through the American Badlands in the late 19th century, brought to life by exacting prose and a gallery of gothic characters (including a hag claiming to be Miette's dead father's love and a woman who begs Miette to find her children's bones at the bottom of a well). By turns cinematic in its rendering of landscape and heartbreaking in its rich depiction of its young heroine, poet and novelist Caple (Mackerel Sky) employs a full range of language and experimental narration to innervate the plot. Interspersed through Miette's story are minor characters' perspectives and larger-than-life portraits of Calamity Jane rendered through colloquial tall tales, dime-novel hyperbole, and something close to genuine biography that lend a fascinating tone to the book and blur the line between the historic woman and the myth she became. As Miette travels the wild country in search of her mother and herself, an early line in the story continually haunts her journey: "One likes to believe in the goodness of people. But the people you meet on the road, well, sometimes the unseen cannot really see themselves."
