Joe Kidd opens this one in a place most novels never bother to go — deep inside Lakota oral tradition. The Prologue, "The Four Times Broken, The Fifth Time Chosen," traces four generations of twin births across the plains: Tȟašína Lúta (Red Blanket), the brothers Wíyak Agleška and Wíyakh Agleška who find each other again during a buffalo hunt, and the third pair, White Buffalo Man and Red Sacred Wind, born under a sky heavy with talk of White Buffalo Calf Woman. It's genuinely moving, mythic writing — you can feel the drumbeat in the sentences before you even meet a single "modern" character.
Then the book jumps forward and grounds itself in TJ, full name Thomas Jefferson Lakota, who grows up bouncing between a trailer court, a house behind a bowling alley, and a two-bedroom in Lawrence, raised by an aunt and haunted by a black-and-white photo of his grandfather, White Bear, labeled simply "WHITE BEAR, 1962." The scene where TJ gets his name at thirteen, sweating in a lodge outside Lawrence while his uncle tells him in Lakota and then English that he's "Tȟatȟáŋka Máškè Čhinkšé — Son of White Bear," is one of the book's best — it sets up TJ as the family's future lawyer-arguer before he's even chosen the path himself.
His twin, Tommy, ends up on the opposite track, and the book's midsection turns into something closer to a technical thriller once Tommy walks twenty-four miles across the land near Sliprock and Paradise to find something worth drilling for. The scene where "hole three" breaks through at four hundred and ninety-seven meters is tense in a very specific, procedural way — driller Marcus watching the weight-on-bit indicator drop, radioing "Tommy — hole three, we're in," and Kam arriving four minutes later with the atmospheric sampling package already in hand because she'd been ready the whole time. From there the story tips into genuinely strange territory: an underground sea, an oil lake, a gem-studded rock, an "Obsidian Road" — like the family saga quietly opened a trapdoor into a lost-world adventure.
I'll admit the tonal whiplash took me a minute to adjust to. One chapter you're sitting with Hana grieving and TJ dissecting Indian land law with a righteous, aching clarity; a few chapters later you're deep in drill-site jargon and cavern exploration with characters like Daria and Pete. It's ambitious — a book trying to be a family epic, a legal/identity story, and a subterranean discovery adventure all at once — and it mostly holds together because TJ and Tommy's bond, and the "twins" motif reaching all the way back to the Prologue, keeps pulling the threads back to the same center. This volume actually carries you through two labeled "books" (Revelation, then Discovery) back to back, so it reads more like the first big chunk of a longer saga than a single self-contained novel — worth knowing going in if you want a tidy ending.