I'm working on my review of The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers tonight and I'm having some trouble deciding just exactly what kind of book it is. One thing is certain - it is historical. It takes place in the very late 19th century as one of the survivors of Custer's Last Stand recalls his military career. The period details are all well done and Frederick Benteen, someone who was really there in Wyoming, comes across as an honest and well drawn character. His recollections of his former comrades are also well written and I never doubted author Delia Falconer's sincerity or honesty while reading this book.

She did her research, that is certain.

But what is it really all about? Benteen has received a letter, a letter like many others, and he has decided this time to respond, this time to tell someone else just what it was like before and after Custer made his foolhardy charge in the Battle of Little Bighorn. In the contemporary period, Benteen spends one day wandering around his house in Georgia remembering the times out west, remembering the people he once knew so well. His recollections cover more than Little Bighorn however, they stretch back and forth over his military career as he tries to explain to this unknown letter writer just who the men were who died with Custer; just who all of them were. And that is when the book strays into poetry, when it transcends any easy genre classification. You can call it literary history, you can just call it literature, but really it is something more specific, something smaller and more carefully defined. Last Thoughts is part of a tiny field of books that reach inside the minds of men at war - of men of war - and seeks to explain and define and recognize them as the conflicted and confused and heroic and cowardly creatures that they are.

How the hell Delia Falconer has done this, I do not know. But she takes you there, she takes you into their hearts and makes them real. She makes you care about would be poets and singers; about men of intensity and simplicity, about men who kill because someone says they should and then die because someone else decided it was time. Falconer sees all of this at Little Bighorn, she sees every last one of those frontier men and she lets Benteen remember them, struggle to understand them, in her book. (It's a novella almost - less than 100 pages.)

I don't know how she did this and I don't know what to call it but it certainly has impressed me a great deal. I love when a writer does something new, and does it so well. It's what I read books for, and why I keep coming back for more.