From Bookviews
Bookviews, the online review site, has high praise for Kansas author Leah Martin’s novel Inside the Silver Light. "Set in the Badlands of South Dakota," Bookviews reviewer Alan Caruba says, "it tells of three women’s lives who must cope with life in an unforgiving place."
"Beginning in January 1984," Caruba says, "a hidden murder on the Pine Ridge Reservation brings them together in a tangle of revenge, broken love, death and redemption. It makes for compelling reading."
"Place is important in this novel," says Martin, a native Kansan. "The reservation is stark, vulnerable, and edgy." The book weaves in events of the American Indian Movement and its clashes with the Federal government in the mid-seventies. A ten-year-old boy whose parents were killed during this time has come of age. This man touches the lives of native Americans, cowboys, Jesuits, mission teachers, and other people on the reservation in tragic and mysterious ways, throws lovers together, and tears them apart.
Martin says, " The book also shows the deep complications that can develop between two cultures, between whites and natives."
"Being faithful to memories that haunt me," is what inspired the book, she says. "I lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation for a number of years and could never forget what the place did to me. I remember seeing two graves on the roadside. They were adorned with four ribbons–black, white, red and yellow. I was told they represented the four directions and were the colors of the American Indian Movement. Those graves held the bodies of AIM members."
One of Martin’s students on the reservation was the young daughter of a prominent AIM member. "He was imprisoned for his part in the movement," she says. "Every spring my student and her family would load up the car and drive to Leavenworth to visit him. He’s still there."
"But it wasn’t until several years after I left the reservation that I truly understood," Martin says. "I came across Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Matthiessen wrote an astounding book about the continuing oppression of the Lakota people. In America we have our own conspiracies, cover-ups, and acts of terror. Our Western culture remains comfortable and powerful at the expense of other cultures. Such is the dilemma of the Native American."
Alan Caruba, Bookviews
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From the Heartland Reviews
Inside the Silver Light is a superbly crafted novel centered in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation. An Indian wife seeks revenge for the death of her best friends from her white husband, a rancher who is holding on to his beef operation as best he can. Two white lady mission teachers struggle: one to find the man of her dreams in time for her biological clock and the other to get men to leave her alone. Add in illicit relationships with members of the American Indian Movement and the support of a wealthy Hollywood actor and you’ll find out why trouble is brewing in the badlands. The author weaves a complex story about love, hate, revenge, and redemption with startling insightful strands of Native American spirituality, culture, and the unique environment of the rez. Her previous experiences as a teacher in a Jesuit Mission school at Pine Ridge opened a window into this world through which she artfully draws the reader to demonstrate an understanding of modern day Native American issues. We rated this a high five hearts.
Bob Spear, Heartland Reviews
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Publisher's Review
The silver light of Leah Martin’s 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 has a splendid sense of the way in which forbiddingly open spaces and equally forbidding, close-knit communities can hide bitter secrets. Ms. Martin’s characters, both the strong and the weak, have a fateful way of stumbling into the paths of other people’s 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 Winnie’s white husband, Beau, whom Winnie has discovered to be the one who drove Coyote's parents off the road to their deaths. When Kate’s roommate, Maria, enters into a passionate affair with Winnie’s 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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