Bohemian Girl

Young Harriet's father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian--and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet's story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, Harriet sets off on a trek to find her father, only to meet with ever-stranger characters and situations along the way. She befriends a Jewish prairie peddler, escapes with a chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War balloonist, and becomes an accidental shopkeeper and the surrogate mother to an abandoned child, while abetting the escape of runaway slaves.
A picaresque in the American vein, Terese Svoboda's new novel is the Bohemian answer to Willa Cather's iconic My Ántonia. Lifting the shadows off an entire era of American history in one brave girl's quest to discover who she is, Bohemian Girl gives full play to Svoboda's prodigious talents for finding the dark and the strange in the sunny American story--and the beauty and the hope in its darkest moments.

Author: Terese Svoboda
Publisher: Bison
Published: 09/01/2011
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.56lbs
Size: 8.55h x 5.55w x 0.51d
ISBN: 9780803226821

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/18/2011
Booklist 09/01/2011 pg. 55
Library Journal 09/15/2011 pg. 72
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2011
Shelf Awareness 09/02/2011
Foreword 08/30/2011

About the Author
Terese Svoboda is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Tin God (Nebraska 2006); a collection of short stories, Trailer Girl and Other Stories (available in a Bison Books edition); and a nonfiction book, Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.