Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Buffalo Soldier

The Buffalo Soldier
reviewed on + 194 more book reviews


from the cover: With his tradmark emotional heft and storytelling skill, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian presents this resonant novel about the formation of an uncoventional family-the ties that bind it and the strains that pull it apaprt. Two years after their twin daughters die 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 somany indiffernt families that he can't believe that his new one will last. In the ensuring months Terry and Laura will struggle to emerge from their shell of grief only to face an unexpected threat to their marraige. Terry's involvement with another owman. meanwhile Alfred cautiously enters the family circle, and befriends an elderly neighbor who inspires him with the story of the buffalo soliders, the balck calvrymen of the old West. Out of the entwinging and unfolding of their lives, The buffalo Soldier creates a suspenseful, moving portrait of a family.