The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Readers who have come to expect mysterious circumstances of death and new age disciplines as standard elements in the novels of Chris Bohjalian will find neither in The Buffalo Soldier. But the Vermont landscape and plainspoken New Englanders that are another of the bestselling author's trademarks are unmistakably present in his eighth novel, a touching tale of love and loss, rejuvenation of life, and reclamation of hope after unthinkable tragedy.

Vermont state trooper Terry Sheldon and his wife, Laura, have lost their twin daughters to the indiscriminate currents of a flash flood. Two years after their daughters' death, having learned they are unable to conceive again, they seek to fill the void in their family by taking in a ten-year-old African-American foster child. Alfred, a sensitive yet withdrawn boy, has experienced more than his share of adversity, and he struggles to navigate the unfamiliar waters he encounters in this all-white, rural community within a family in crisis. Alfred's love and trust are not easily gained or given, and though Laura and the boy steadily develop an attachment, Terry fails to forge any real connection with the seemingly indifferent child. Frustrated by the widening chasm in his marriage, incapable of accepting Alfred into his heart, and unable to acceptably express his grief, Terry enters into a brief extramarital affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy. The potential dissolution of Terry and Laura's marriage threatens to plunge Alfred back into the maelstrom of institutional care. All could be lost unless the intrepid Buffalo Soldier -- as Alfred comes to style himself, after the African-American cavalry troopers whose legacy of integrity, honor, and personal responsibility inspires him -- can rescue them in time.

This quietly soulful novel speaks directly to the heart. It's an elegantly told story of salvation and the surprising places in which it can be found. Chris Bohjalian creates unaffected characters that are gentle and steadfast, vulnerable and fallible -- in a word, human. Expertly crafted with distinctive style, The Buffalo Soldier is a worthy addition to an already impressive body of work. (Ann Kashickey)

From the Publisher

With his trademark emotional heft and storytelling skill, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian presents this resonant novel about the formation of an unconventional family–the ties that bind it, and the strains that pull it apart. Two years after their twin daughters died in a flash flood, Terry and Laura Sheldon, a Vermont state trooper and his wife, take in a foster child. His name is Alfred; he is ten years old and African American. And he has passed through so many indifferent families that he can’t believe that his new one will last.

In the ensuing months Terry and Laura will struggle to emerge from their shell of grief only to face an unexpected threat to their marriage; Terry’s involvement with another woman. Meanwhile, Alfred cautiously enters the family circle, and befriends an elderly neighbor who inspires him with the story of the buffalo soldiers, the black cavalrymen of the old West. Out of the entwining and unfolding of their lives, The Buffalo Soldier creates a suspenseful, moving portrait of a family, infused by Bohjalian’s moral complexity and narrative assurance.

Book Magazine

Earnest, powerful, The Buffalo Soldier takes its time with ordinary lives: It's a long, involving tale of love and lamentations, home and heartache, written with intelligence and generosity of spirit. Those qualities, unflashy and dependable, typify the writing of Chris Bohjalian, a weekly columnist for the Burlington Free Press who hit it big in 1997 with his fourth novel, Midwives. Combining a legal thriller's momentum with a mildly provocative commentary on alternative medicine, that story was a ready-made selection for Oprah's Book Club. Midwives established Bohjalian as a chronicler of working-class life. The small-town Vermont in which his fiction is set is an intriguing one: of snow and rivers and roadside diners, yes, but also of characters, oftentimes tight-lipped and complex, who are gripped by private struggles. It's an off-kilter Norman Rockwell vision, with darker shadows.

The Buffalo Soldier takes us deeper inside. The story begins in anguish when twin nine-year-old girls drown in a flood of biblical ferocity. In extreme close-up, we witness the aftermath of tragedy: "Their eyes were closed, their hair was tangled with thin twigs and leaves, and there were great clods of mud in the small hollows cast by their joints. Their bodies were bent into shapes that no living person—even a contortionist—could bear." The girls are the only children of highway patrolman Terry Sheldon and his wife, Laura; Bohjalian's story will become one of coping, of coming to terms with the devastation.

Terry, stoic, macho, a kind of competent, hard-worked state trooper straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song, reels quietly and retreats intothe busy solace of his job. Laura simply retreats. A worker at the local Humane Society, she occasionally drags herself into the shelter, seeking the comfort of the orphaned animals. Mainly, however, she withers. "There were months when she didn't believe she'd ever get better—and, what was more important for everyone around her, it was clear that she didn't want to. For a time, for her, there had been Prozac. And there had been the church, though she wasn't exactly sure there had been God."

It's Laura's idea to adopt a child. Into their lives, the couple brings ten-year-old Alfred, already a scarred veteran of foster homes. He's shipped to the Sheldons' hamlet from Burlington, a town big enough to have at least accommodated his sense of difference. He's an alien in this new place not only because of his history (the mother who abandoned him was a prostitute), but also because of his heritage. He's just about the only black kid for miles.

Around Alfred, secretive, shell-shocked, silent (his initial sullenness mocks the Sheldons' memories of their girls' bright laughter), a small world will explode. The boy is startled especially by Laura's kindness, but he's learned enough never to trust. One of the book's more affecting scenes finds Alfred hoarding food and utensils in his closet: He's never sure when he'll be forced to move again. "If you only took one or two things a week, the grownups rarely figured out that you were building up a stash," he reasons. While Alfred's relationship with Laura is strained, his relationship with Terry is virtually nonexistent. The two simply can't connect.

Terry's distance from the family only intensifies with yet another twist of fate. On a hunting trip, Terry indulges in an illicit tryst, a tumble less passionate than desperate. In a melodramatic turn of events, the woman becomes pregnant. Laura's discovery of the betrayal, Terry's eventual remorse and his new lover's alternating anger and clutching are all handled sensitively by Bohjalian. What elevates The Buffalo Soldier, however, is the presence of young Alfred. As the adults in his newfound home fret, dissemble and nearly disintegrate, the boy becomes stronger and eventually comes into his own.

He is helped by a neighbor, an old man who, like Alfred, feels out of place in the community. He gives Alfred a book on the buffalo soldiers of the 1860s, black riders in the U.S. cavalry. For Alfred, those riders become dream heroes, inspirations. An experienced horseman himself, the old mentor even teaches Alfred to ride.

The novel climaxes with a flood that echoes the book's beginning and provides both a catalyst for Terry and Laura's reunion and a moment in which Alfred's dreams of heroism become real. We see him on horseback at the end, achieving at least a temporary release: "His whole body starting forward with the big animal in two-point and then—the horse's legs extended before and behind her, a carousel pony but real, the immense thrust invisible to anyone but the boy on the creature's back—he was rising, rising, rising.... And aloft."

While Bohjalian isn't the page-turning storyteller that, say, Stephen King and Alice Hoffman are, he may be something rarer yet equally fine, a remarkably empathetic writer who cares sufficiently about his characters to invest them with genuine warmth, an almost tragic dimension that's rare in mainstream, accessible fiction. With this novel, he's again proved himself a valuable resource—an author of concern and attention. With imagined lives as real as Terry's, Laura's and Alfred's, he's given voice to grief, loneliness, hardship and, ultimately, hope.
—Paul Evans

Publishers Weekly

The capricious ways of nature frame this eighth novel by the popular Bohjalian (Midwives; Trans-Sister Radio). Several years after the devastating loss of their nine-year-old twin daughters in a flood, Vermont residents Laura and Terry Sheldon decide to adopt a child. When a state agency grants them a taciturn 10-year-old African-American boy on a foster-parent trial basis, they acquiesce, albeit with some reluctance. The trial is no less unsettling for the child, Alfred, who has already endured separations and is aware of his solitary status in the small, white town. What will save the boy, and lend poignancy to the novel, is a growing friendship with an elderly neighbor, Paul, a retired teacher, who accepts him without preconditions. He gives the boy a book about a post-Civil War western black cavalry unit, the Buffalo Soldiers, and a cap with a picture of their buffalo symbol and then invites the boy to learn to ride his horse. Alfred, moved by the book, responds to Paul and begins to break out of his isolation. Bohjalian writes honestly and often movingly, but his characters do not escape stereotyping. Terry, a uniformed state trooper, is all tough policeman when he catches Alfred arranging a hidden stash of food. He angrily accuses him of thievery, insensitive to Alfred's fear that he may be rejected and need to escape. Laura, an unhappy, colorless character, is only lent dignity by her growing love for the boy and a willingness to understand him. In an echo of the book's opening scene, another natural disaster brings the novel to a handy but credibility-straining conclusion. Bohjalian's facile handling of both plot and narrative makes for fast reading, but fans may conclude that the result feels rushed and cursory. 13-city author tour. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Bohjalian crafts a masterful story of loss and love set against the vagaries of northern Vermont's weather. The six different voices heard are varied and distinct. From the foster child, Alfred, who finds a connection to the Buffalo Cavalry Soldiers of the past, and his foster parents, Terry and Laura Sheldon, who are dealing with the earlier loss of their twin daughters in a flood, to the strong secondary characters of Phoebe and elderly neighbors Paul and Emily, the author has created a community of conflict and understanding of both grief and need. Alison Fraser deftly captures each of these very different voices. The only flaw is the lack of audio identifiers for the cassettes. Highly recommended.DJoyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

It sounds like a TV movie of the week, but Bohjalian's eighth novel, among them the Oprah-picked Midwives (1997), works hard and pretty successfully to transcend the hackneyed scenario of parents adopting a child after losing their own. After a sudden flood kills the daughters of Laura and Terry Sheldon, a highway patrolman and his wife, they struggle for two years to cope with the loss. Finally Laura, unable to have more children, persuades her husband to take in a foster child. And so Albert arrives, a ten-year-old African-American boy-this in an all-white rural Vermont town. Neither a child from hell nor a particularly lovable one, Albert has endured the routine cruelties of the foster care system, and he enters the family with little hope of change. Although he's the only African-American in town, however, he suffers surprisingly little overt racism. But plenty of insensitivity. "I am completely color-blind," announces his teacher proudly. "I treat all my students as if they were white." His classmates tolerate him, but their schoolboy cliques remain closed. Yearning for friendship, he finds it in an elderly neighbor, a retired teacher who allows him to care for his horse and teaches him about the buffalo soldiers, black cavalry who served in the American west after the Civil War. The story would be half its length but for stepfather Terry's one-night stand with a young woman who becomes pregnant. Although she's not willing to break up his marriage, Terry finds himself yearning for a child of his own, and their affair resumes. Devastated when she learns of it, Laura demands that he move out. He does, but the crisis is resolved and the marriage endures. Another that may be in the Oprahmode, a tale of family torment. But Oprah's picks as a rule have literary merit, and this is no exception. Despite a conventional plot, Bohjalian's characters ring true, and he writes with insight and feeling.

Details from Seller

• ISBN: 0375725466
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: February 2003
• Condition:

Comments from the Seller: Minimal damage to the cover, dust jacket not necessarily included minimal wear to binding, majority of pages undamaged, minimal to no highlighting/underlining of text, no missing p

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