You probably will not enjoy this book, by the New York author unless you are prepared to be throughly confused, at least until more than half way through it. It is unclear who is black, or white, or somewhere in between, who is a Confederate soldier and who is Union, who is severely wounded or dead, who has fathered whom and who is orphaned or adopted. The time shifts between early in 1833 and 1874 after the Civil War had ended do nothing to clarify the confusion and many characters are unnamed while others have several fake names, one wounded soldier cannot even remember his own name, and there are duplicate names for more than one character. The gruesome details of the Civil War and its aftermath on the lives of many are detailed.
With a bit more than 100 pages left, the relationships of a few of the main characters starts to come into focus, and at least some start to make sense. But it takes huge leaps of imagination to figure out what is going on in many places. For example one character is suddenly shoved into a deep, underground root cellar that is then locked, but just a paragraph of unrelated information later is sitting at a feast eating sponge cake.
The author does not use quotation marks, blending direct quotes with narrative that frequently changes tense; at times the speaker is not identified. Dreams mix with reality.
The writing and depiction of the era in American history is interesting, but I remained confused to the end. There are a number of inappropriate verbs out of context (“ConaLee featured she had seen him snatch it up…) that made me wonder if the proofreaders or even the writer was relying on spellcheck or some form of AI. There is resolution of some of the disparate and conflicting information towards the end, particularly in the Epilogue, but I still had unanswered questions about some of the characters and events. Perhaps I simply have lost, or never had the ability to retain so many disparate complex characters clear in my mind. Maybe if I reread it, it would make more sense, but that is not about to happen.
This book reinforces my outlier status as to what kind of books I enjoy. It has received lavish praise from a number of critics, but I have begun to wonder if they are all truly independent or a carefully selected few. It is clear that I often rate books much lower than the critics, but also seldom enjoy a book that critics uniformly pan.
3.5/10
Thanks, Alana.
The Passionate Reader 