Praise and Reviews
"Maltman's prose and pacing flow from an expert hand. His gaze is unflinching and balanced...while there is much loss in the novel, in the end there is salvation." Full review » —The Denver Post
"[W]e all set our sights on the Great American Novel...[and Maltman] comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail...wonderfully nuanced...beautifully expressed." Full review » —The Boston Globe
"Set in the 1860s and '70s, Maltman's superb debut evokes a Midwest lacerated by clashes between European and Native American, slaveowner and abolitionist, killer and healer, nature and culture…Maltman excels at giving even his most harrowing scenes an understated realism and at painting characters who are richly, sometimes disturbingly, human. The novel sustains its tension right to the moment it ends" —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"[A] gripping and detailed tapestry of German settler and Dakota ethnography, legend, myth, and reality that recreates this oft overlooked period in American history." —Minneapolis City Pages
The Night Birds, soars and sings like a feathered angel, its song the history of the Sioux uprising in southwestern Minnesota in 1862, an event lost in the smoke of history as the rest of the nation had its hands full with the War Between the States...rich...stunning...it should be listened to, its words allowed to take wing before coming to rest in your heart. —The Chicago Sun Times
"Maltman's liquid prose paints a complete picture of the settlement of the Midwest. Though the book is a novel, not a history, it's a remarkably poignant narrative in time, an elegant portrayal of a period little known in American history." —Rocky Mountain News
The novel weaves effortlessly back and forth in time, chronicling the lives of the Sengers and the Dakotas, whose fate is tied to their own. Thanks to Maltman's gift for storytelling, we, too, can learn about the pain of this forgotten era. Full review » —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
[L]uminously written and harrowing. —Minneapolis Star-Tribune