Set largely in a fictitious small town in the deep south just as the American Civil War ended, this Texan’s debut novel is chuck full of realistic interesting characters and depicts a community deeply divided by the arrival of Union soldiers and the legal end of slavery. The hesitant suspicious former slaves seem lost with their new-found freedoms and inevitably bigotry and discrimination remains rampant. A black lad falsely accused of murder escapes from prison with the help of a loyal white friend who was a Confederate deserter and flees to the North to work that is little better than that of a slave.
I won’t give away more of the plot which is not very complex, although there are a few interesting twists. But the beauty of the story is in the characterizations including a kind and non judgemental prostitute, a touching almost accidental forbidden homoerotic love tryst, and an enigmatic hardworking farmer who can’t seem to express any emotion, with fantasizes of hunting down a mysterious animal that may exist only in his imagination. The writing is truly poetic and loaded with quirky metaphors. “His eyebrows twitched like a tickled caterpillar.”
The author seems to have heeded the old writer’s adage that the decision on the title should be the last act of completing a novel- this title is enigmatic and only tenuously connected to the story.
I listened to the audiobook. (No one can read an audiobook). The male narrator does a fine job of conveying the varied idiomatic talk of the male characters, but I wish a woman had taken over when the women were speaking, as his attempts to imitate them falls flat.
This is a very pleasant read and an introduction to a unique time and place.
Thanks, Din, and Goodreads.
The Passionate Reader 