Perma-Bound

In 1862, led by Chief Little Crow and incited by the government’s failure to provide their annuity, the Dakota Sioux staged an uprising in Minnesota, slaughtering hundreds of settlers. As a result, 38 Dakota men were hanged, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Maltman’s promising first novel bounces between the years leading up to this atrocity-laden conflict and 1876, when the James-Younger gang would stir up its own brand of bloody mayhem in Minnesota. Following the struggles of the Senger family, Maltman keeps the telling personal and local, tacked to the Senger’s farm and the Dakota tribe situated a stone’s throw across the river. His account of the lives, toils, and customs of the wary neighbors is nearly innate, and the tenuous relationship formed and then warped between the two is as fascinating as it is tragic. Heavy with dark symbolism, though never ponderous, and dense but never unreadable, Maltman’s earnest prose sometimes tends toward melodrama but is ultimately tempered by his flawless sense of history marked by its most revealing—and harrowing—details.