Book excerpt: Award-winning writer of Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey, winner of the 2020 Will Rogers Medallion Award, a 2019 Spur Award Finalist and an “Editor’s Choice” by The Historical Novel Society In 1941 Jonas Walks-Through-the-Storm, a full-blooded Cherokee horse trainer in rural North Carolina, trains an equestrian unit at Camp Tuckasegee. As he straddles the racist divide while working with white men, a mutual love develops between him and the wife of an officer. In modern-day Chicago, Jonas’s one-quarter-native grandson, Russell, battles racism of another color. As a teacher at a mostly black school, he burns out in work, marriage, and self-esteem by sliding into alcoholic dissolution. Divorce, dismissal, and dejection quickly follow. Trying to exhume his self-respect, Russell attempts to revive his lineage through a self-imposed “trial by fire” alone in a night forest. This ceremony leads to a journey to retrace his grandfather’s story. Due to a past scandal, memories of Jonas have been erased in Russell’s family. Yet Russell’s childhood excursions with his grandfather persist. Wandering across Illinois and Wisconsin he interviews the people who knew Jonas and discovers a chain of sobering tragedies. When the search leads to North Carolina’s mountains, Russell comes full circle to his grandfather’s old homestead and discovers the love and purpose that the old man had bequeathed to him through a kinship with the land . . . and a brotherhood with horses. Praise for Mark Warren “Woven with clarity and colorful prose, Warren leads readers on an odyssey . . .” —True West Magazine on Promised Land “A good book offers the ultimate escape . . . armchair travel to those wild places of the imagination. Warren’s book took me to places I had previously not expected to visit, but I’m really glad I went there. —New Zealand Booklovers on Promised Land "Warren's novel paints a vivid picture . . . and its colorful similes will put a smile on any genre-fiction lover's face." —Booklist on Born to the Badge