Buffalo Spirits is filled with affection for the Great Plains and the extraordinary people bound to it. Insightful and disturbing, Elizabeth Black's first novel confronts the problems faced by farm families struggling to stay on the land they love.

Senator Bob Dole

Black offers a moving, and justifiably tragic, depiction of the fate of the farmers, land, slaughtered buffalo, and feedlot-incarcerated cattle of the Great Plains.

Kirkus

Part Native American lore, part ecological treatise, part mystical odyssey, and perhaps, part autobiography, Black’s debut novel leads her readers along unexpected paths. Rebecca grows up in Western Kansas in the 1950s, moves to Chicago, and becomes a successful journalist. But behind this normalcy lies a moody, nomadic soul. As a child she communes with Gentle Wind, her “spirit sister,” who lived on her family’s land a century earlier. Rebecca loses touch with Gentle Wind but keeps her fierce allegiance to the plains. Whenever she returns home, Rebecca is angered at the changes time has wrought … Interspersed chapters written in the voice of Gentle Wind recount the “great buffalo slaughter” from 1865 to 1875 and the gradual demise of the Plains Indians, culminating in their removal to an Oklahoma reservation. The end result is a poignant family saga and an enlightening history lesson.

Deborah Donovan
Booklist

The Rockville writer’s heritage, “the windswept plains of western Kansas,” is the foundation of her first novel, Buffalo Spirits …

Ellyn Wexler
Rockville Gazette

Black has written a novel comparable to the non-fiction Prairie Earth by William Least Heat Moon. But she writes as a native Kansan struggling with her own personal prairie experience and not as the awed first time visitor. Her portrait of Highway 150 as a scenic bridge across the Flint Hills and the ever-shifting color palate of Kansas grasses is painted as only a homesick native Kansan can. The author knows the minutia of a mostly-vanished rural life—one-room schools, country churches, making a living from the vagaries of dirt farming and the avarice and pettiness of rural landlords. The heroine constantly returns to Kansas, each time digging more deeply into her family’s history and literally into the land itself. Her surprising resolution is based on finally knowing more about Kansas and her western Kansas community but also about herself.

Dale Suderman
Marion County Free Press

This exquisite, complex, touching, truth-telling, lyrical book pulled me through it almost non-stop. Black gives us characters to care about, mystical elements to wonder over, and an intriguing mystery to captivate us in the final chapters. But Buffalo Spirits’s power comes from its history and its message. Her story-telling not only bonds us to the truth of our past, but it admonishes us to seek out a just, egalitarian, sustainable way of living. Let us all read it and take notice. I'm glad Black has the words to make us see and feel and think. Having grown up in western Oklahoma, I can vouch for the details she just flat out nails, down to the falling rain tinkle which the wind makes in the cottonwood tree leaves. The book works on so many levels.

Phyllis Wipf
Wichita, Kansas

This is the most beautiful story I have ever read about my native state of Kansas. Thank you for writing it. I am returning to my home state after an absence of 20 years. I did not realize how much I missed the wind and the prairies and the freedom.

Pamela Graham
Lake Charles, Louisiana