Blue Horse Dreaming is the story of Abigail Buwell, who is kidnapped by a Native American tribe and later redeemed by U.S. military troops. Distraught at being returned, Abigail views her redemption as yet another captivity with freedom still agonizingly out of reach. Ultimately, she remains a captive on many levels?in the shackles of otherness, language, physical confinement, womanhood, and motherhood. Blue Horse Dreaming is also the story of Major Robert Cutter, the man into whose hands Abigail is delivered. Through his tormented eyes, we see a vividly compelling portrayal of life on a far-flung military outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War where troops and civilians suffered from crushing poverty, famine, and illness, just beyond the traces of an emigrant trail whose way is marked by gravesites. This is a novel of hauntings and of the haunted, in which the ghosts of the past, both beloved and despised, raise their heads to compete for the souls of the living left behind. ?Melanie Wallace has given a remarkable and utterly original turn...The originality of Wallace's novel lies not in her plot but in the powerful and often beautiful language with which she conveys Abigail's sensibility and the major's sorrow. She renders their unreal, nightmarish surroundings, for example, with a kind of tranced Faulknerian precision?Time and again, Wallace finds the one right word to lift an otherwise ordinary sentence into art?? ?The New York Times Book Review