This book's writing style is appealing. The prose style gives the book a melancholy tone, besides, the book is about such a place in the middle of America. Characters are a bit loosely presented, however, again, the narrative style of the book enriched the feeling in the setting. It's a broad, wide, endless horizon where a culture has been through crisis and so did its people.

The reading is like one follows narrator's footprint, to smell the mellow, to join the borderless, and to feel the space. Space has been filled with thoughts, impeccable.

Thanks for the publisher offering the book in exchange of an honest review.

Badlands, a Novel, New Photo Edition: New Photo Illustrated Edition Vol 2, Num 7 Melinda Camber Porter Archive of Creative Works by Melinda Camber Porter is a book I requested from NetGalley and the review is voluntary. This is not what I expected. I thought this was going to be a good book about a couple going through the Badlands. This is about a strange couple and the woman seems to despise Indians, the feeling I get from the book, and she hates the whole area. She finds no beauty in the land either. She wants to be home and away from there. Her husband is there as a lawyer for a Native American law suit. Right away they meet kids and they are playing, the little boy says he is Steve McQueen and the girl says she is Madonna. The boy asked the woman who she is. The woman says the boy has snake eyes. What? The book continues like that. There is no rhyme or reason for the things they do or say, it is just nonsense. No real plot, no likable characters, just a waste of my time. The "New Photo Illustrated Edition" contains a few pictures, don't expect is to have more than handful scattered pictures of flowers or fields. They are a bit grainy and not appealing in the least. Putting this book in my worst-books-ever file.

Based on the travel adventure of the author, Melinda Chamber Porter, and her husband. This story revolves around a woman who accompanies Adam to South Dakota so he can represent an Indian named Blackfoot in a lawsuit surrounding lands near Indian graves. The narrator fantasizes about having sex with several of the men she encounters. This book is a reminder of the Native American's heart-breaking exposure to the white man. The book had exquisite and hauntingly beautiful photographs of the Badlands. Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

A young Englishwoman accompanies her lawyer boyfriend Adam to the Badlands of South Dakota, where he is representing a Sioux man attempting to protect some threatened ancestral burial sites. As she discovers more about the land and the people who inhabit it, she becomes more and more emotionally engaged and sexually obsessed and whilst trying to save her own relationship with Adam fantasises about relationships with the other men around her. It’s all very overwrought and all about confronting personal demons and going on journeys of self-discovery and it’s all very tedious and doesn’t lead anywhere significant or meaningful. One plus point is the inclusion of some evocative photographs, but as for the narrative, well I couldn’t get on with that at all. Self-indulgent and rambling and uninteresting and not one for me.

This is a rather strange book - not at all what I expected. As a child, I traveled with my family through the Badlands several times on summer vacations. It was a stark, haunting landscape. This book touches on that - the beauty of the land and its uniqueness. But I had the feeling throughout that the author was trying to cover too many things at once - - be too many different types of books at once. Was this a coming of age book? An understanding of the American Indian? A romance? A novel of violence? It seemed to bounce back and forth among several themes and became somewhat tedious to follow.

A worthy effort, but just ok for me.

Although the title indicates a novel, this is much more than that. Based on Ms. Camber's travels to her husband's homeland of South Dakota, the descriptions of the land and its peoples are awe-inspiring. Set in the times of the violent and heart-breaking destruction of a native peoples' homeland, the corruption of their life style, and the differences skin color can make, I recommend this book to the more adventurous reader.

"Badlands" is a peculiar novel, although it's only a novel in a very loose definition of the word. But it is stunning nonetheless.

An Englishwoman travels to South Dakota with her American boyfriend Adam, who has agreed to represent Henry Blackfoot, a Sioux man who's initiated a lawsuit against a local white farmer whose land, he claims, has Sioux sacred sites on it. But once Adam arrives, he discovers that it's just as much about Henry's relationship with Marta, the farmer's wife, as it is about sacred burial grounds. Henry Blackfoot is a compelling man, but he's not the noble Indian Adam was looking for. The narrator, meanwhile, finds herself peculiarly attracted to, even obsessed by, Blackfoot. What follows is less of a structured narrative than it is a dive into the narrator's attempts to understand herself, America, and her homeland.

The question of what is America and what is Indian country looms large in the story: as the opening lines say, "There is a wound in this country, a gaping wound, wide as the open sky that graces it, hidden deep in the earth and covered with the sentimental growth of wheat. It is Indian country." A few lines later, the narrator concludes that this may be God's Country, but in that case, "one would be tempted to believe that the Good Lord had sick ideas about white and red and yellow and black skins, and that even when the Indians built their churches to him, even then he left them unrewarded with a dank plot of land, and worse still, no will to make it blossom green with rare scents. To see these people one feels sad with oneself. For to have myth and magic in one's past, to be part of the childworld, believing in mountains becoming men, and such, seems to be the stuff of which failure is made."

Throughout the story the narrator, Adam, and the Dakotans they encounter wrestle with this problem: that this glorious, sacred landscape has been covered over with a thin but disfiguring layer of the trashiest detritus of modern civilization, corrupting the native peoples along with it, who hide from their troubles in alcohol, and look to sleazy Wild West Shows for a renaissance. "You can't go seeing the land like this," the narrator wants to tell one of the local boys, "day in, day out, missing her beauty, the way she is, just because she was once the garbage can shaped by government treaties. This land wakes up in the dawn with more ecstasy than I've seen in Italian sunsets over the Arno, with more grace than the summer light dancing on Mediterranean waves. For now, the land is startling, mauve rim of the horizon, cutting the moon's huge face as she sinks, and the Badland buttes stretch to eternity, prisms of light making rainbow waves, one after the other, over her wrinkled rivers of still mud. You can't go on seeing the land castrated, sad just because they left her to you as a prison, a way of keeping you out of the fertile land, where the farms are white and Jesus prospers."

But there's nothing the narrator or anyone else is able to do to save the self-destructive characters from their destruction, and the narrative becomes increasingly disjointed as it becomes increasingly violent and tragic. As she confronts the awakening sexuality of Blackfoot's daughter, the narrator is carried back to her own awakening sexuality, which now rules her life so that she chases after Adam, Blackfoot, and a tribal policeman she happens to encounter as she's driving along with Blackfoot's daughter, whom she may have kidnapped in order to save her from her own budding desires. Intense, dark, and fragmented, with possible parallels begun but never fully explored between the Badlands and the narrator's own England--both are full of ancient sacred burial grounds--and between the persecution of the Native Americans and Adam's Jewish father, who had to flee Nazi Germany, "Badlands" is a rich, slow, challenging read, with scenes of disturbing sexuality juxtaposed with scenes of lyrical beauty. A story not for everyone, but for those who wish to flex their reading muscles while plunging into the most beautiful, most terrible part of America, highly recommended. The photographs in the new edition, taken by the author during her own travels across South Dakota, add another layer to this already multi-layered work, and are beautiful and evocative in their own right.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.