This author puts out a book just once every ten years or so, I was excited going into reading this as I thoroughly enjoyed her other books. I wasn’t disappointed with this one – there is a lot to like here.
As usual the writing is excellent – detailed, unhurried, and poetic without feeling too artsy. There is a story here that takes a while to come to life. The way the author brings to life the place and the era (1970s Alexandria, Louisiana) – it takes time to set this up and thankfully it isn’t rushed. The vibes while reading about this brought to mind Steven Spielberg’s style – especially his movies about coming of age. We spend a lot of time with one particular character, a twelve-year old girl, and seeing the world through her sharp but innocent eyes reveals a lot about that time and place.
The location gives the chance to explore (kind of in the background) race relations of the time, and examine how a dynasty crumbles.
My favorite section was Harriet and Hely’s expedition to capture a poisonous snake – I couldn’t believe how scary and real that part felt. It is rare for a book to give me the willies like that – but I read it twice just to see how well it was constructed to freak us out.
It was a fairly long book, and sometimes I was wondering if it was really taking me anywhere. The story presents a mystery in the first chapter and this mystery provides the impetus to many of the events in the book, but finally at the end of the book the resolution of the mystery is not really clear – a blink-and-you-miss-it offhand comment that may or may not provide the resolution we are hoping for.
But part of the message I got from this book is that the world isn’t black and white and sometimes we don’t get the things we want. The author used a clever device with the story of the Antarctic explorer Captain Scott, and how “victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.”
My only real criticism was that some characters felt extraneous (for example, Allison) and were used more as a way to provide points of view during key moments. Maybe I was missing something with their inclusion.
While I am still reading the book on the making of the James Bond movies, I’ve changed the pace of that reading to go along with watching each movie, so it’ll take quite a long time to finish that book. But for my next active read it is The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.
