A publisher's review of Leah Martin's Inside the Silver Light

Publisher's review: Intrigue among the Lakota Sioux in the Badlands of South Dakota erupts into passionate action in Leah Martin's finely-written contemporary Western novel Inside the Silver Light.

(PRWEB) August 1, 2004 -- The silver light of Leah Martins title bathes a troubled and spirit-ridden landscape. In 1985, the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota still festers from wounds opened in the 1970's by the Wounded Knee uprising and other conflicts between the American Indian Movement and white authorities.

Coyote, a young Lakota Sioux whose activist parents died when their pickup was forced off the road by an unknown driver, lets his car run out of gas on a remote road during the coldest night of a bad winter on the reservation. This mishap brings him into contact with two women who will shake him loose from his aimlessness. Kate, a volunteer teacher at a Jesuit mission on the reservation, is afraid of everything that might bring her close to the human touch she craves. Winnie, the Lakota wife of a white rancher, carries a guilt that causes her to feel increasingly haunted by the spirit voices of her people. Without quite realizing what they are doing, both women seize on Coyote as a catalyst for the solution to their dilemmas.

The author, who spent four years living on the Pine Ridge reservation, has a splendid sense of the way in which forbiddingly open spaces and equally forbidding, close-knit communities can hide bitter secrets. Ms. Martins characters, both the strong and the weak, have a fateful way of stumbling into the paths of other peoples obscure plots. Timid Kate finds herself caught up in an improbable cattle stealing operation. Vengeful Winnie and her native American lover are the leaders of the ring of thieves. Their target is Winnies white husband, Beau, whom Winnie has discovered to be the one who drove Coyotess parents off the road to their deaths. When Kates roommate, Maria, enters into a passionate affair with Winnies husband, Beau, the tangle of relationships hardens into a conflict from which tragedy must result.

Ms. Martin adroitly uses the barren and yielding landscape of the Badlands National Park as a metaphor for the qualities needed to survive on the reservation. In the Badlands, as she puts it, the strong do not survive, but rather the small and the weak. After the lovemaking, lawbreaking and violence have run their course, it is the once aimless Coyote who emerges most whole.

The complicated and fast-moving story is told with fluid and often poetic language, an eye for the nuances of people and places, an offhand wit, and a taste for the erotic. A notable storyteller, Leah Martin uses Inside the Silver Light to illuminate a significant and dark corner of the American experience.

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