This book is a hard one to rate. Based on literary merit alone, I would say
this one deserves at least 4 stars for its incredibly atmospheric, descriptive
writing that made me feel like, from the very first paragraph, I was being
transported deep into the mountains of 1950s North Carolina, into the world
inhabited by a one-legged whiskey runner named Rory and his feisty folk-healer
grandmother Maybelline (Granny May). Throughout the story, there was a generous
amount of vivid description that often spanned several paragraphs, at times
even several pages, of everything from the smallest minutiae to major plot
points and character developments. I always
appreciate descriptive writing, especially the kind that is immersive and makes
the reader feel as though we are right there beside the characters, feeling
what they are feeling, experiencing what they are experiencing – indeed, the
writing here was gorgeous, even lyrical in places, and as I don’t read Southern
fiction very often, plus I grew up on the West Coast in a big city, the many
lush descriptions of the countryside and mountain region really helped
establish time and place and put the entire story into perspective for me.
With that said however, this was not an easy read by any
means -- even though I loved the writing, I found myself struggling through
much of the story. The lyrical nature of
the prose coupled with the descriptiveness already made this a challenging read
in that there were parts where it was nearly impossible to understand what was
going on without re-reading passages and then taking the time to absorb what I
had just read. I’ve never been a fast
reader, but for this one, I felt like I had to slow down my reading by several
notches, which wouldn’t normally be too big of an issue except that in this
case, I wasn’t particularly keen on the subject matter of the book. This was a dark, gritty, violent story that
revolved around whiskey, bootlegging, and auto-racing (though on a deeper level
it was also about love, revenge, buried secrets, loyalty, family, the long term
effects of war, etc.) – this type of subject matter I’m not generally interested
in, so at some point, especially in the second half of the book, I started to lose
patience with the overly descriptive style (or perhaps it was exhaustion from how
laborious this felt to read) and so I found myself skimming quite a bit near
the end.
In terms of the characters – I actually did like most of
the characters in this and for me, Rory and Granny May were two of the most
complex and well-developed characters I’ve encountered in a while in a work of
fiction. However, I still found it difficult
to connect with these characters as well as everyone else in the story – the emotional
element was mostly lacking for me.
Overall, I would say that I did like parts of this one,
but as a whole, this book probably wasn’t for me. I’m still willing to give this author’s other
books a try though, as I truly do like his writing style – perhaps with
different subject matter, I may be able to connect with the story more next
time.
Received ARC from
St. Martin’s Press via NetGalley
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