"I was Indian, but no more. Now I'm something different altogether."

"I've spent these last years taking from people. Their money. Their livelihoods. And if you were to ask me what I was doing it for, I couldn't give you an honest answer. Mostly I told myself it was to get revenge on Whites, but that isn't it. Not all of it, anyway."

Michael A. McLellan continues to reshape the Historical Fiction/Western genre with the third book in The Americans series. In this standalone companion to In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree and The Scout of Wounded Knee, a ten-year-old boy is taken from his family and sent to a Christian boarding school in southwest Kansas, where he's given a new name and stripped of everything Indian. The school, run by an enigmatic man known only as Reverend, immerses its students in English and religion under the guise of assimilation into White society. As the boy becomes a young man, he finds himself caught between who he was, and who he was taught to be.