I would have thought that by now it would be impossible to write anything interesting and new about the settling of the American West. In Liar’s Moon, however, Philip Kimball does just that, offering us a fresh look at a very old story. The tale begins in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War when two toddlers, Will and Sojourner, are separated from their families in Kansas and are raised in the wild by coyotes. They are sought by an itinerant preacher, the brother of one of the lost children, as well as a women who herself was stolen as a child by Cheyenne Indians. Along the way, we encounter a remarkable array of other characters, including cowboys and Indians, medicine men, former slaves, soldiers, farmers and ranchers.

The manner in which the author tells a unified story from so many different angles is both engaging and extremely imaginative. In Kimball’s poetic prose, Will and Sojourner themselves become metaphors for the way the country is rapidly being transformed and how the people of that time dealt with those changes. Indeed, as the novel progresses to its conclusion some 40 years later, the reader can feel right along with the protagonists how the eastern expansion starts to (literally) fence in the frontier. I enjoy the way that other notable authors (e.g., Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy) have treated this same topic and while the writing in this book is not quite in that class, reading it was still a satisfying experience. ( )