Rating: 3/5
Review:
Disappointing
Like so many others, I thought Kevin Powers's The Yellow
Birds was quite exceptionally good. Sadly,
A Shout In The Ruins isn't nearly of the same quality. There is a lot of Powers's lyrical and
sometimes very beautiful writing, but as a novel I found it very disappointing.
The story cuts between time periods (seemingly almost
compulsory for new novels at the moment) around the Civil War and the early
50s, both in Virginia. The stories are…well…confusing, to be
honest. There are illustrations of the
cruelty of the slave era and depictions of the characters who both suffered and
imposed that suffering, and there is also a pretty good evocation of its legacy
in the era of segregation. Both of these
still have relevance today and it should form a powerful indictment of racism
in modern society, but for me it was too mannered in structure, too disjointed
and too full of disparate characters to have the necessary coherence. I also felt that after books like The
Underground Railroad, Days Without End and The Sellout (to name just a few) it
was treading well-worn ground without adding much.
I'm sorry to be critical of an author I respect greatly, but
that's the truth of it. It was well
written and it certainly wasn't terrible, but it just didn't engage me and I
didn't think I'd gained much from reading it.
Only a very qualified recommendation from me, I'm afraid.
(My thanks to Sceptre for an ARC via NetGalley.)
No comments:
Post a Comment