The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 [Paperback]

Jim Fergus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 2006

Now in paperback, a stirring historical novel from the author of One Thousand White Women

When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he heads West hoping to leave his troubles behind. He joins the 1932 Great Apache Expedition on their search for a young boy, the son of a wealthy Mexican landowner, who was kidnapped by wild Apaches. But the expedition's goal is complicated when they encounter a wild Apache girl in a Mexican jail cell, victim of a Mexican massacre of her tribe that has left her orphaned and unwilling to eat or speak. As he and the expedition make their way through the rugged Sierra Madre mountains, Ned's growing feelings for the troubled girl soon force him to choose allegiances and make a decision that will haunt him forever.

In this novel based on historical fact, Jim Fergus takes readers on a journey of magnificent sweep and heartbreaking consequence peopled with unforgettable characters. With prose so vivid that the road dust practically rises off the page, The Wild Girl is an epic novel filled with drama, peril, and romance, told by a master. This is the novel your reading group will be talking about long past your discussion!

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Following the success of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, Jim Fergus has once again combined fact, fiction, history, and landscape in The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 to bring to life a group of disparate people and an event made more real through his imaginings.

Ned Giles is a 17-year-old orphan whose father's advice in a suicide note was that he should "buy himself a good camera." Ned is working in the clubhouse at the Racket Club in Chicago when one of the members posts a notice: "The Great Apache Expedition: This expedition ... plans to go into the Sierra Madre Mountains on the boundary between Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico, to attempt to recover the seven-year-old son of Fernando Huerta…the boy having been stolen by the Apache Indians ... when three years old..." Ned decides to leave Chicago and present himself in Douglas, Arizona, where the expedition is being organized, in the hope of becoming the expedition photographer. He drives his father's Studebaker Roadster, the last vestige of his old life, and eventually fetches up in Douglas. What he finds there is every boy's dream adventure and then some.

Fergus sprinkles stock characters throughout the narrative: the hard-drinking, overweight newspaper man, Big Wade Jackson, who really does not want to put up with the hardships of the expedition and is only too happy to send Ned; Tolley, the gay preppy from Princeton, having been sent by his father in the hope that it would "make a man out of him"; Margaret Hawkins, a cultural anthropologist and Ph.D. candidate from the University of Arizona, who looks at the whole escapade as a field trip; and a mean-spirited Chief of Police, Leslie Gatlin. Into this mix are thrown two Apache guides: Grandfather Joseph Valor, wisely resigned to the world as it is and Grandson Albert Valor, Apache hothead.

The main evet of the novel is, however, La Niña Bronca, the wild girl of the title. She is treed by the hounds of Billy Flowers, who heard the Voice and left home and hearth to become a hunter of predators. He takes her to Douglas, bound hand and foot, and she is thrown in a jail cell. She bites anyone who comes near her, but Ned is finally able to wash and feed her. And so begins the central relationship of the story. It is decided that the expedition will trade this girl for the Huerta boy. Turns out that isn't as easy as it sounds.

There is a wraparound story here that is utterly meaningless--author's notes, a prologue, an epilogue, the author's apology to the Apache people and all sorts of extraneous claptrap that is needless clutter. The basic narrative is a good one; stay with that. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Depicting the dusty Depression-era West this grandly, cinematically imagined sweat- and bloodstained saga, inspired by events that took place in Arizona and south of the border in the Sierra Madre badlands, dramatizes latter-day conflicts between whites and Native Americans. During the fall of 1999, an obscure, financially struggling photographer, Ned Giles—now in his early 80s—sells, for $30,000, La Niña Bronca, his only copy of a photo of a young Apache girl lying on the rude floor of a Mexican jail cell; the buyer's curiosity about the picture's provenance sparks Ned's memories. The rest of the book, set in 1932, reveals a legacy of heroism and lost love through Ned's scrupulously detailed diaries, which vividly recount a nightmare of harrowing misadventures beginning the day he signs on to be a part of the Great Apache Expedition, one of dozens of men hoping to free the son of a wealthy Mexican rancher kidnapped by the Apaches. (The wild Apache girl will be used as ransom.) The narrative unfolds as a series of flashbacks, intermingling short passages from the third-person POV of the fierce Apache girl and first-person excerpts from the diaries of the 17-year-old Chicagoan photographer on his first big assignment. Fergus (One Thousand White Women) makes unforgettable characters move against vivid landscapes in this laudable encore. Agent, Al Zuckerman at Writers House. 5-city author tour. (May) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; First Edition edition (April 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786888652
• ISBN-13: 978-0786888658
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jim Fergus is a former freelance writer who has published hundreds of articles in dozens of regional and national magazines and newspapers. He is the author of three novels, and two books of nonfiction. His bestselling novel, One Thousand White Women, has been a favorite selection of book clubs and reading groups across the country for over a decade. The novel won the Mountain and Plains Booksellers association Fiction Award. The French translation - Mille Femmes Blanches - won the "Best First Foreign Novel" award in France, and has sold over 400,000 copies in that country. Fergus' most recent novel, Marie-Blanche, a sweeping family historical fiction that spans the entire 20th century, was published in France in the spring of 2011. An English edition of Marie-Blanche is soon to be published in America in Kindle format. Jim Fergus divides his time between southern Arizona, northern Colorado, and France.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A breathless adventure, with lyrical descriptions characters that seem nearly alive, August 2, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 (Hardcover)

In 1999, elderly photographer Ned Giles explains one of his photographs to a man attending a New York showing of Giles's photos. The image is of a young Apache girl in a Mexican jail. The girl, Giles says, was called "the wild girl," and was found naked and starving in Mexico's Sierra Madre. The man purchases the photograph, leaving Giles to remember the girl's story, and his own, in detail. The tale, relayed by journal entries, flashbacks, and from the point of view of several characters, is set in 1932 and begins with the girl running desperately through the arroyo below the Sierra Madre while the cougar hunter Billy Flowers chases her.

Seventeen-year-old Ned Giles joins a large expedition as a photojournalist to Mexico to retrieve a kidnapped boy from the Apaches. Ned makes friends with wealthy and outspokenly gay Tolley, cultural anthropologist Margaret, and his own young assistant, Jesus.

Meanwhile, Flowers chases the Apache girl again, as she has escaped. The girl had been with her family, in a raid led by her crazy brother-in-law, Indio Juan, when they kidnapped the rich rancher's little boy. She remembers the kidnapping as she hides in a cave from Flowers. When Flowers finally catches the wild girl, he has no idea what to do with her, and so he takes her to the nearby town jail.

In the tiny village of Bavispe, Sonora, Ned encounters the shocking sight of the Apache girl tied to a post in front of the jail. He arranges to bathe and clothe her. Along with his friends, he hatches a plan that should benefit everyone, including the girl and the kidnapped boy --- trade the girl for the kidnapped boy. A small band consisting of Ned, the girl, an English butler, Tolley, Margaret, Jesus, and two Indian scouts set off to accomplish the mission. The Apaches soon capture them, and Ned finds himself in "...another world, a world with its own sun and moon, and its own separate race of man" --- and in imminent mortal danger.

As a tribute to Jim Fergus's talents as a storyteller, I literally could not put down this novel, staying up until nearly dawn to finish it. The characters are full-blooded and alive; the adventure unfolds at a breathless pace and the descriptions are lyrical. As I watched Ned Giles leave chilly Chicago to set off on his adventure, my mind movie changed from black and white to warm Technicolor. The story felt so real that I actually checked (several times!) to be sure that the word "novel" hadn't somehow changed to "nonfiction" on the jacket flap. This is one of the best books I've read in years, and a story that will remain with me. Very highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History re-imagined poignantly, May 16, 2005

By 

Ron Franscell, Author of 'Sourtoe Cocktail Club' - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 (Hardcover)

It's funny how authors invest the very act of writing with a kind of sweet magic, whether to exorcise demons, or merely to kink history by telling the way it should have been.

Now Jim Fergus, one of the West's premier literary storytellers, has undertaken the resurrection of a long-dead Indian child, and given her the history he wishes she'd had - not the painful truth of her existence.

"The Wild Girl" is, in every respect, a historical novel, inspired by several true stories. Fergus embroiders his tale with enough threads of truth (and a healthy bibliography) that it resonates with authenticity, but the heart and soul of the story are equal parts of Fergus' hope and imagination. And it's a little prayer that somehow the truth can truly be rewritten.

Fergus is a poetic writer, but not a florid one. His gift is in simple prose, vivid action and human stories. Like other literary writers of the West, the landscape and climate loom large as distinct characters that color the hearts, minds and actions of the human players. For the money and genre, Fergus is as good a storyteller as Kent Haruf, William Kittredge, Ivan Doig and Thomas McGuane, and with Mark Spragg and others, represents the next wave of gifted regional authors.

(And for those fans of Fergus' columns and nonfiction, a sad note: His faithful yellow Labrador Sweetzer, a fixture in Fergus' 1999 road-essay book, "The Sporting Road," died in 2003.)

This new novel's journal structure, punctuated by third-person segments from other points of view, is an authorial minefield, but Fergus tiptoes through it skillfully. While telling his story in the journal structure might have been safer, it also would have mirrored the structure of "One Thousand White Women." The current commercialism of publishing notwithstanding, who can blame an author for not wanting to repeat himself?

Moreover, who can blame an author for wanting to rewrite an unpleasant history? "The Wild Child" is a tragic life seen through a prism of time, heartbreak and distance, and the light has been refracted into something poignant and spiritual.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming of Age in the South-West, May 15, 2005

By 

Tim Krause "Tim" (Biron, WI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 (Hardcover)

Jim Fergus weaves an enduring tale of Ned Giles' trials and tribulations growing up in an unknown corner of the United States.

Set during the Great Depression, Giles sets off on an adventure to free a young white boy from the bronco Apaches. Fergus is masterful in entertwining a great adventure with the personal growth of Giles as he struggles to learn that life is seldom black-and-white.

When Giles looks back over the decades at his time in the southwest, it's with the acknowledgement that all of the decisions that we make send us down a path in life that is uniquely our own.

Fergus tells his story with the same detached, honest assessment as Giles does when he's hiding behind his camera, capturing the lives of the bronco Apaches.