Soaring Eagle's Embrace
The Legendary Warriors Series
By Karen Kay 

     Kalifornia (Kali for short) Wallace is in love - with her exciting job as a photographer, providing the pictures for her father's books. She has traveled all over the world with him, visiting remote tribes and recording their unique ways of life for posterity and now she is in Blackfeet territory. While camping on Chief Mountain to see the sunrise, she is told a beautiful love story by her guide Gilda and then runs into a vision of a man - a proud brave who does not seem quite real. But Soaring Eagle is only too real and not at all pleased to have these white intruders on the reservation, for surely all whites are bad news? Kali has some things to learn about how Native Americans are treated in their own country and Soaring Eagle is determined to show her his way of life…

     This is a straightforward love story, and none the worse for being just exactly that. It is also the tale of the terrible plight of the Native Americans, and illustrates in a series of rapid sketches how narrow reservation life is and how badly the white settlers treated them. To add to this are excerpts at the top of the chapters from two books, and wound about the romance is the haunting spirituality of the Blackfeet tribe. The protagonist is gentler than the usual alpha male although certainly persistent in his desire to wed the fiery-haired Kali. She is not your average Victorian Miss, although I didn't think her quite tough or independent enough to have led such an unconventional life. Her father is remarkably philosophical about the idea of his only daughter abandoning him and living with a Native American! Even for a person of his type and thus this part of the story was the least convincing. Enjoyable though, and the whole tale conveyed a wonderfully haunting impression of a lost way of life and the wild beauty of the West.