I can't really judge this book on character development or plot, since I only read the kindle sample which, though much longer than typical, admittedl...moreI can't really judge this book on character development or plot, since I only read the kindle sample which, though much longer than typical, admittedly can't showcase an author's strength in these areas. What I did read, however, gave me no confidence that the author would be capable of furthering her ideas of corporate time-travel, which seem derivative of "Doomsday Book, In the Garden of Iden, or Up the Line, mashed-up uneasily with romance-y type works such as Outlander or The Time Traveler's Wife. Maybe "derivative" is being a bit hard on the author as there is nothing new under the sun, and no idea that hasn't been used before. I will say, since I have read all of these other novels, that Ridgeway's book is by far the most poorly written, with stilted, simplistic sentences larded with descriptions of flashing eyes, flaring nostrils, and dastardly cousins; it is difficult to believe that the author is a college professor, as the first chapters are written on the sixth grade level. Her historical background, too, seems very thinly researched, as if she thumbed through one of Johanna Lindsey less-inspired offerings, and caught a glimpse of the words "cravat", "earldom", and "carriage" as the pages flashed past.
So maybe I am being unfair, but the scene that made me realize that this book could not be taken seriously was Nick's mother's actions after Nick's father dies in a riding accident. It seems to me that there are several realistic ways a human being, and not an inhabitant of Romance Land, would react to witnessing such a tragedy:
1) Race to the broken body of her spouse and call for aid, even though the situation looks hopeless. 2) Stand there in shock (or secret satisfaction, depending on the state of the marriage) and do nothing at all. 3) Faint or fall into hysterics. 4) Calmly realize that her husband is dead and, with a great deal of mental and physical effort, get the people around her to move the body.
What I CANNOT imagine is the new widow PRYING OFF THE RING from the finger of the still warm corpse of her husband, strolling over to her teenage son, handing him the ring, and CURTSEYING almost down to the ground. Really, now--who would do such a thing in real life? Did the author get confused and think that her book was set in a minor caliphate in a fantastic realm? I mean, come on. Could you imagine Jane Austen writing such a scene?
I'd like my characters in what is passed off as non-genre literature to behave like real human beings. Of course, if it is a romance novel you're writing, go right ahead and compose such a silly interlude. Knock yourself out. I might even enjoy it, if I were in the mood for such a thing and knew exactly what I was getting.
My feelings might change, of course, and I might try again, which is why this is not a DNF for me. I doubt it, however. The riding-accident incident hinted of worse things to come. And if you did like it, or think that I am just being hard on the book...well, that's fine. But you might prefer Kage Baker, who died far too young, if you like this sort of genre hybrid.(less)
Mr. Kubicek is still alive to refute this sort of manipulative, exploitative, poorly "researched" falsehood, but the number of Holocaust survivers dwindles every day.
Or if you are curious as to the lives of the children of high Nazi officials, read the interviews of the children of Franz Stangl, the White Death, Kommandant of Treblinka and Sobibor. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience.
Or if you do want a Holocaust fable that does succeed in being emotionally and factually honest, read Briar Rose.
I read a reasonable amount of historical fiction, and I like the depiction of past eras to be gritty and even grim, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. I...moreI read a reasonable amount of historical fiction, and I like the depiction of past eras to be gritty and even grim, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. If I'm reading about a housewife in Elizabethan England, I want to see her lifting up her skirts to step over the rivelets of ooze in the street if she is running an errand near the shambles, and I want to see any sailors, towards the end of a long period at sea, to be knocking the weevils out of their hardtack; heck, they should just ignore the wriggling creatures and go ahead and eat the biscuits; they are, after all, good protein. I also hope that my authors will strive to be as true as they can to the period they are writing about; I prefer the details to be correct. At the same time, however, I realize that authors of historical fiction can't be spending all of their time in research libraries; errors will creep in, or new discoveries will be made, no matter how conscientious the writer may be. The novel has to be written, in the end.
I understand, too, that there is disagreement on how much people have changed throughout the centuries. Are the mind-sets of people from other times so altered from the modern era? I happened to think that they were very different, so when I read a work from a author such as Robert McCammon, who states in his interview here http://www.robertmccammon.com/intervi... that he doesn't really believe people have changed very much, I am probably going to find his characters rather anachronistic; or at least, not accurate depictions of what I can only imagine long vanished people to be. Fair enough. I can't really criticize an author's decision to go in that direction. It is, after all, only a guess.
I can, however, call him to account for inexcusably sloppy research, and for a fascination for the foul and vile that borders on the lurid. I get it--past times were none too clean, epecially out on the frontier; people stank, clothing reeked, and houses crawled with insects and were choked with smoke. McCammon's seemingly new-found discovery of these not very interesting facts (history isn't stuffy! he exclaims over and over in the previously cited interview) is like a little boy who has skewered a pile of dog poop and goes waving his stick gleefully in front of the grown-ups. "Lookee here what I have found! Isn't it COOL!" (Actually, I should have written "skewered a rat" instead; so many rodents are pitch-forked, crushed, drowned, smashed, that at times I thought I had wandered into a William and Mary era whack-a-rat game show; McCammon seemed to have just tossed in another rodent death when he was at a loss for ideas, which was often.) All of this endless description, which slows down the pace to a crawl, serves no real purpose, especially as it is often not really accurate.
I almost stopped the book at page 75, when he made his first really big historical boo-boo. (I'll pass over the highly unlikely conversations the two main characters, the magistrate Woodward and his clerk Matthew, on their way to try a witch at the town of Fount Royal, have with the slimy innkeeper, but the manner in which sexual details are disclosed is beyond ridiculous.) McCammon describes the home of Bidwell, chief mover-and-shaker of the fledging town, as having a dining room that would serve as the centerpiece of an English castle. I'm sorry, but that is absurd. Here is Bacon's Castle, one of the most imposing homes of the time, located in Tidewater Virginia, one of the most highly developed regions of the early colonial era, constructed just before this period of this book:
(It was actually less grand at the end of the 17th century, since the service wing was rebuilt and the roof was raised a floor much later.) And here are two English houses of the same time period, which I also visited during my years living in England. (The first one, Wimpole Hall, once every season as it has an excellent home farm which kept my toddlers busy):
And Belton Hall, just up the road an hour or so from my home, which I include as it was constructed during the same decade as Bidwell's imagined mansion:
It's pretty clear that nothing constructed during the colonial era (or until the times of the robber barons) would be judged worthy of being the centerpiece of an English manor house. So McCammon's just taking a bit of artistic license, right? He just wants to contrast the opulent home, with the barely beaten back nature in the form of incessant insects buzzing around, with the wretched hovels. All right, but then he has Magistrate Woodward, who is portrayed as a decent, mild man, condemning young, pretty white Rachel to burn at the stake, for the crime of witchcraft, and for petty treason for supposedly killing her husband.
Guess how many white women in America were burned at the stake through judicial process during the colonial period? None. That's right: zero, nada, zip. There are NO adequately documented cases of a white woman being executed by this method in the colonies. English Common Law of the time period sentenced a person judged guilty of witchcraft to the gallows, as anyone even casually familiar with the Salem Witch Trials knows. And petty treason, though technically punishable by death by fire, was NEVER enforced on a white woman.* Clearly, if you were a black slave, man or woman, who dared to be involved in a slave uprising, or a white man who had the audacity to help in a revolt, you might very well be condemned to the stake. But a woman and her white skin was safe from the flames.**
So is Rachel's sentence an anachronism? A sloppy bit of research by the author? So what if Woodward--and by proxy the author--condemns her to the most gruesome and dreaded of executions--death is death, right? But I do think it matters, particularly as this barbaric custom is part of the story of slavery, and not of colonial white America. You have to decide how important this distortion is to you. I can only view McCammon's plot twist as the sensationalistic misreading of the historical record by a third-rate writer who is willing--even eager--to put a tawdry spin on everything. Why do I think this? Well, after starting to skim through the salacious and vulgar depositions (thorny cocks! blood dripping from female parts!) and the tedious descriptions of the thought processes of every single character that serves only to bloat an all ready deadly slow narrative, I was no longer terribly interested in the fates of the cartoonishly nasty characters (all the inhabitants of Fount Royal except the beautiful--of course!--young witch) and the Scooby-Doo-ish eager young Matthew. (Rachel herself is as wooden as the stake the townspeople want to lash her to; only Woodward was a well-defined creation who held my attention.) I kept going, however, as it was a buddy read, despite my suspicions that the author was revelling in the gross details. I stopped even skimming when I came upon the utterly out of place (view spoiler)[ drawn out account of a blacksmith's sexual assault upon a mare--complete with the love words whispered to the unwilling beast and an elaborate description of the mechanism designed to carry out such a foul encounter AND WHICH IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE PLOT AS WE HAVE ALL READY BEEN HIT ON THE HEAD THAT THE BLACKSMITH IS A DISTURBED INDIVIDUAL. There is also a sniggering insinuation that the horse enjoyed it. (hide spoiler)]. What's more, McCammon defends this disgusting and extraneous episode by saying that such events are part of the historical record. Very convenient of him to be suddenly concerned about historical authenticity, wouldn't you say? http://www.robertmccammon.com/intervi...
No, I did not finish the book. But I don't have to finish a bowl of stew, either, to know that something putrid lurks within it. (I did peek to the end of the book just to confirm my guess as to who the villain was; it was obvious when s/he first stepped onto the stage, so it wasn't even a good mystery.) Suffice to say that I was no longer feeling charitable enough to overlook the author having his characters using matches, envelopes, eating stewed tomatoes, using pounds instead of stones to describe human weight, referring to "tricorn" hats when the correct usage for the time would have been "cocked" hats, the use of "Violet"--a Victorian invention--as a proper name, or the countless other errors that showed that the author didn't even care to do more than a modicum of research. Just throw in another dead rat seemed to be his philosophy.
Not surprisingly, there wasn't even the consolation of interesting language to pull the reader along. McCammon's flat, leaden prose-- without style or grace--is as uninventive as his facts are made up. His sentences are just words slapped one after another like bricks upon mortar. But at least, at the end of the day, a mason might build something useful, like a wall. This book, on the other hand, is a poorly-constructed, ersatz fake that reminds me of nothing so much as: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/mag...
DICKENS WORLD--COMPLETE WITH PIZZA HUT
If you are an uninspired author, you can pretend to bring the past to life, much as the theme park Dickens World pretends to bring back the Victorian era by releasing a few chemical smells in the air from strategically placed "smell pots". By focusing on the nasty and the reeking, and by conveniently ignoring the truth, you can sketch a shadow of the past for an unwary audience. But in the end, the unlucky reader of this book is not transported to another time, but just trapped in a modern warehouse, just like the ticket-holders of Dickens World. An affront to the serious reader of historical fiction, a tiresome slog for the seeker of some escapist fun, and an insult to horses everywhere, this book is to be avoided at all costs. In the spirit of the author's own words: eschew this turgid turd.
* The author of Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, whose work remain the cornerstone of women's studies for Colonial Williamsburg--where McCammon did his research--states categorically that she could find no case in the South in which a woman was burned at the stake for petit treason.
** For an overview of the history of execution in the colonies, here's an interesting bit of research from a fascinating web-site, "Before the Needles." http://web.archive.org/web/2008040311...
This is my review, and my complaints are my own. Any tisk-tisking over my request that historical fiction remain somewhat true to the times (as if a less demanding reader is somehow more worldly wise in the ways of fiction) will be, depending on the tone of the comment and my mood at the time, either not responded to--or deleted. (less)
This review is giving me fits! I've been thinking about it for days, and my deadline for my GR book group challenge is almost here: the following is p...more
This review is giving me fits! I've been thinking about it for days, and my deadline for my GR book group challenge is almost here: the following is part of my stalling tactic/chat with my fellow members that I've substituted for, you know, actually writing the review:
Me: I am really having a hard time approaching this review. The Alienist vs. The Gods of Gotham smackdown? Analysis of the plot structure and the demands of a satisfying mystery? The problems of anachronisms--most disturbingly, of out-of-time characters? Pretty language too often tipping over into "rosy-fingered" mush? I write very slowly, and as I have to leave in a few hours, I don't think I'm going to get my bloated kitty badge. :(
From Jane: Here you go:
I read _____. I gave it ___ stars, because of the plot structure, anachronisms, out-of-time characters, and pretty language that devolves into "rosy-fingered" mush.
Me: Thanks, Jane!
So, I am taking Jane's advice. Here you go, Janice:
This novel, which received so much attention last summer, deserves more time than I can give it just now. There's much to admire here--some great language (including the use of underworld "flash"), gritty details, and a complicated denoument, which may satisfy some readers--and frustrate others. But there's a big old problem in the middle of the novel, and it's called (view spoiler)[ Mercy. Not lower-case mercy, as in quality of, but Mercy, the woman.
And for the smackdown? I give the nod to "The Alienist."
I was on the selection committee of a bi-country "real world" book group, and one of the two books that my fellow committee members and I were determi...moreI was on the selection committee of a bi-country "real world" book group, and one of the two books that my fellow committee members and I were determined to push through the overly complicated process for picking the following year's reading list was Richard Ford's "Canada". We were so resolute, in fact, that we were willing to split off from our European counterparts if "Canada" did not make the final cut. (In fact, the group did break up, but it was over a book that we *had* to read, which proves, I suppose, that loathing a title choice is an even more powerful force that anticipating a hyped-up book; there's a moral in there somewhere if you want to find it.) I loved the The Sportswriter trilogy and the reviews for Ford's latest book were laudatory. I was sure that our book group brinkmanship would be worth it.
The novel starts off with a bang, as all the reviews will tell you. You know there's going to be a bank robbery, which is always an interesting prospect. And I liked the depiction of Dell Parsons. I have a son almost the same age, who is also a bit diffident and self-contained, but with an inner core of toughness, just like the main character. (I actually started the novel as an audio while I was walking with my son, and when Dell became obsessed with the idea of keeping bees, I snapped off my book and asked my son what he thought about having his own personal beehive; he immediately got excited, as I knew he would be.) But this novel, which I wanted to love, and was willing to fight for, turned sour for me very quickly. It was a terrible disappointment in so many ways.
I tend to write reviews mostly in response to my own experience of the world; there's a lot of great analysis here on GR, and if someone else had all ready made the points that I would make, I don't really see the need for yet another review. Some other readers loathed this book as much as I did, and we did so for the same reasons. But deeper than my dislike of Ford's dreary, self-important posturings was the major stumbling block that I just couldn't accept the basic construct that Ford sets up. It just didn't work for me on so many levels.
First: his depiction of a military family. I just knew, after listening to Ford throwing in every tired cliche of the military (the socially isolated, the rootless, the peripatetic living practically out of suitcases,etc.etc.) that the author had been in the military just long enough to think that he knew the military, and to dislike, it too. Now negative portrayals of the military, when accurate, don't bother me in the slightest; in fact, I enjoy them. But Ford doesn't understand the military, not at all. (A writer doesn't have to have been in the military to get it; Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff portrays the accelerated nesting--the koa rocker-German cuckoo clock-Polish crockery jumble of furious unpacking--the usual military experience--extremely well.) We military people tend to carry an immense amount of stuff around with us like a snail with a shell; it's what we do to prove we've been around. So...it's highly outside the norm that a military officer's family would live such a stripped-down life; during my husband's career I met just a few--a very few--people with homes like that. It's not likely, but it IS possible.( It's also, quite frankly, the way a lazy writer who really doesn't much about the military would imagine such a lifestyle to encompass.)
It is also highly unlikely that the Parsons family would be so isolated within the Air Force itself, particularly in that time and place. I understand that the family was supposed to be eccentric, even dysfunctional, and that the mother thought she was supposed to be better than everyone else, that she didn't want the kids to mix with anyone. So...I accepted--with difficulty--this far-fetched scenario, too. The moment I just couldn't buy, however, the moment when Ford's cardboard miltary family came crashing down for me was when Dell's father stated that as Air Force brats they knew nothing about the world, or where they lived, and spent too much time indoors. What? WHAT? I don't know of any military parent anywhere who would think that, or say it. It's one of the things that makes the military life bearable, what EVERY military parent says to themselves, and to the kids, that moving from base to base every few years gives the kids to see more of the world than most civilian kids ever do. So I call BS on Ford's whole negative, erroneous, stereotypical views of the military, which I believe come from his own less than positive experiences.
There's another personal reason why I don't buy Ford's book. You see, one of my uncles by marriage robbed a bank, in the same region as Montana, during the same year that "Canada" is set. It's quite a story; both my youngest aunt and my older brother, who accompanied my grandparents on their journey to clean up the mess that their daughter had made of her life, felt compelled to tell me, the last time I talked to either of them, exactly what happened according to their point of view. My aunt, the third sister, had run off with a convicted felon whom my grandparents understandably despised (my mother's family was used to drama, as my own mother had eloped with a Brother of the Catholic Church to Las Vegas, but my aunt's spouse selection was too much for even them to accept) some years before my uncle's botched attempt at armed robbery. My aunt hadn't been heard from--at all--for the better part of a decade. Social services called my grandparents up when they hauled away my uncle and my aunt fell apart. Whether she had had a true nervous breakdown (my second aunt's opinion) or was just flakey and lazy and couldn't get her act together (my mother's opinion) is moot; the point is that someone called family members right away; they just didn't walk out the door and leave the kids all alone in the house, as Dell and Berner are left alone in the book. So no, I don't think Ford's plot twist is realistic, and that (and I'm not being spoilery here since the entire novel is a flashback) Dell's mother, who isn't estranged from her family, would entrust her kids to some near stranger, or that it is likely that the police wouldn't report what was going on immediately to social services. Of course, it could happen--most anything can happen--but when a writer resorts to that feeble excuse, he's just messing with the reader, and being rather contemptuous at that. I can only say that from my own personal experience the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
So, at this point of the novel I was doing a lot of eye-rolling, when I came upon *the scene*. You might know what I mean. Thank God it's not explicit but what the hell is this creepy, totally unneccesary, totally gratuitous (view spoiler)[ depiction of incest (hide spoiler)] doing in the book? Is this Ford's attempt to be edgy? Please. It's completely forced--pretty much like the entire novel--and seems utterly out of character for Dell.
Even with all my objections-the Air Force family by way of Mars, the preposterous unlikelihood of Dell and Berner being abandoned after their parents's arrest--I could have accepted the book. Maybe. I don't know every military family in the world, and thank God, I only have one uncle who robbed a bank in 1960 in the Upper Midwest. But deep down, I don't feel that Ford respects his reader. He repeats things. Over and over and over. Dell's father is tall and bombastic. His mother is dark and "ethnic" and superior. The making of every baloney sandwich is described in excruciating detail, and every piece of laundry flaps slow-mo on the clothesline. Ford connects the dots between every theme point he's making--there's some weird blather about the differences between the United States and Canada that's especially puzzling to this American with a Canadian mother--and underscores these lines again and again so that you, dear reader, will get the grand themes that the author is supposedly wrestling with and which you are too dim to understand on your own. It's as if Ford is afraid of letting the reader draw his or her own conclusions--which might be, in fact, be ones that the author doesn't want you to draw. So no, I didn't find the book a moving allegory on life, and the sins of the parents being visited on the children, blah, blah, blah. I found it a highly artificial, schematic work, by an author who makes the mistake of confusing grimness for profundity, and portentousness for insight. And you know what? It's just plain DULL. That's the worst sin of all.
My vote for the most over-rated book of 2012.(less)
I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Most of the time I think that's a good thing; I feel, as long as you are giving the book your full attention and aren...moreI listen to a lot of audiobooks. Most of the time I think that's a good thing; I feel, as long as you are giving the book your full attention and aren't merging on the interstate, you can really appreciate an author's work, especially when it comes to crafting sentences. You can also (whether fortunately or not) hear the flaws more acutely, especially when it comes to pacing, dialogue, and the author's over-reliance on pet vocabulary. "State of Wonder" turned out to be slightly disappointing to me, and I can't help wondering if I would have been better off reading the book. Or maybe it was better to hear the clank-clank-clank of elements that just weren't working. (Having a narrator who was mediocre but wasn't bad enough to shut off didn't help matters, I admit.)
I try not to scan any reviews or interviews of books that I have already decided to read, and as I had been looking forward to "State of Wonder" for months, I didn't know anything much about it. I didn't know, for example, that Patchett had auctioned off character names for charity. You could certainly hear the artificial quality, though, of the Bovenders being mentioned by their first and last names every single time they were on the stage. ".....and then the BOvenders said..." or "Barbara BOvender stood at the door..." BOvender, BOvender, BOvender. Everytime the narrator mentioned their names, it was like she was hitting a nail on the head. (The Saturns, too.) Ugh. Other name choices bothered me, as well. It was always "Mr. Fox." Yeah, it was an unequal relationship, but she WAS sleeping with him, for God's sake. Had I unwittingly strayed into a Henry James novel? AND the Lakashi themselves. I didn't know, either, that Patchett had, indeed, named the tribe after her favorite cereal (a bit of cutsie-pieness that I find objectionable) but I think I did pick up on it subconsciously, and I just couldn't take them seriously as a faithfully constructed Amazonian tribe. At least I didn't confuse them with "Snap, Crackle, and Pop", so that's something I guess.
The entire pacing of the first part of the book dragged for me; I seemed to have listened to entire CDs where nothing much happened except Marina trudging slowly through Manaus while she waited for Dr. Swenson, the researcher gone-off-the grid, to show up. Being blocked by the BOvenders at every turn, of course. Things got better when maniacal Dr Swenson finally strolled out of the jungle (I do have to say I thought the set piece at the opera was brilliant) and Marina got to the Amazon. At last.
I had other problems with the book that had nothing to do with the audio book format. Marina did more than a few things that made her seem like a bit of an idiot. The phone going astray, for example.I sympathize with Ann Patchett's dilemma. In the modern world, where family members can pick up the phone or e-mail and moan about car problems to deployed spouses in Afghanistan, it's hard to really isolate your characters sufficiently when the plot requires it. The satellite phone loss should have been handle better--it should have been broken or stolen, not packed away in checked baggage. I never really regained my respect for her, it was such a tyro's mistake. Marina also had another huge lapse of judgement at the end of the book, one that I didn't find completely believable. Some people might. It's a toss-up, for me.
Of course, the entire premise of the book--naive behind-the-desker is sent off by her company to find her lost colleague in the Amazon--is also improbable, as is the biological/ecological basis of the lost world that she encounters. I was willing to overlook these sticking points in the spirit of adventure; other readers may not be so forgiving.
There were sections of the book I really enjoyed. Marina's introduction to the jungle--her stumbling disorientation-was great. The bug-slapping, skin swelling stickiness of it all made me feel as if I were there, in the Amazon, where I never want to go. And I enjoyed the supremely self-confident and arrogant-to-the-point of obliviousness Dr Swenson, even if she was a bit of a cliche. In the end, though, the book turned on a literal bend-in-the river coincidence that I just didn't buy. The entire book came crashing down, which was a pity.
I was sorry I couldn't like this book more. I wanted to. I YEARN for big sweeping novels, with active heroines doing amazing things, and stories that grapple with big ideas. But at the end, Patchett seemed to drop all those grand themes, the ones that she always seemed a bit tentative about all along, in favor of a cheap Hollywood ending. It made me rather sad. Really.
**spoiler alert** Sometimes a book makes such an error that the reader stops dead in his tracks. I'm not talking about nit-picking a small detail so t...more**spoiler alert** Sometimes a book makes such an error that the reader stops dead in his tracks. I'm not talking about nit-picking a small detail so that the reader can be accused of being pedantic. (In the early years of our marriage my husband would lean over to me in movie theaters and whisper that that guys in war movies were wearing uniforms that were a little out of date but I finally broke him of that habit). No, I'm talking about making a totally dumb factual mistake, like having a regency heroine taking a casual stroll to Windsor Castle when the author really meant Buckingham Palace, or misunderstanding a character's world point of view so fundamentally that the reader literally jerks his head from the pages, and even if he does manage to continue the book he never really trusts the author again. I once had a friend fling "Pet Cemetery" aside; no vet, she said, would be against sterilizing dogs and cats, and since she worked as a veterinary assistant she knew what she was talking about, and had no interest in reading a book whose protagonist was so far-fetched. Alan Brennert makes such an error in Moloka'i, only his misstep is even more egregious than Stephen King's since it is an important, though not central part of the plot.
In the beginning, I liked the book well enough. I lived in Hawai'i for some years. I know how deeply skeptical (to put it mildly) people born in the islands view haole mainlanders coming in and writing about their homeland, but I was willing to give it a try. Besides, what did I know about turn of the century O'ahu since I had never lived there, and one brief visit to Molokai and occasional chats about the island with an acquaintance who had grown up there certainly didn't make me an expert. It was a choice for my book group, too, so I thought I'd better get going.
Young Rachel develops leprosy in turn of the century O'ahu and is eventually sent to the colony at Kalaupapa. The description of the symptoms of the disease, and the long bureaucratic process that banishes her to the other island, make for interesting reading. The novel traces the course of her life, and as sometimes happens in this sort of historical novel which covers a long period of time, the author crams in a lot of laboriously-researched events and details that don't quite fit, and it may also be for that reason that the book had a certain emotional distance. I never felt that close to the main character. OK, a great many historical novelists fall into this trap; it's understandable that you want to share all that hard work.
It was at this point the author makes his big mistake.(view spoiler)[ Rachel and her husband have a baby, and they are forced to send the baby away. The little girl is adopted by a Japanese couple and they move to California. Eventually she and her new family are put into the internment camp at Manzanar.
It.Could.Never.Have.Happened. Not in a million years. Not today, and certainly not almost a hundred years ago. No issei peasant family would have adopted a child---especially a girl(!) that was a hapa (or as the Japanese say, hafu) girl from an unknown, "unclean" bloodline. It would have been out of the question. It simply is not possible. When I told my husband about this plot twist he looked bewildered and said "Was the family really Christian, or something? But even so...."
You see, my husband and I have lived in Japan, and one of the organizations I belonged to has sponsored an orphanage since the end of WWII. The children grow up there; almost none of them leave in "outside" adoptions. It is NOT a Japanese custom (or indeed an Asian custom) to adopt outside the family. Bloodlines are very important. And the idea of a non-Christian man with three boys agreeing to take in a strange girl just because his wife wanted a daughter was just so deeply wrong that I set the book aside and wondered if I should continue. I am sorry not to be PC, but these are the facts and the author should have known something about Japanese culture. It would have taken two minutes of research.
But no, the author was bound and determined to shoe-horn Manzanar into the plot, just so that he could make a heavy-handed parallel of the two internments, so he shoved it in, with no regards as to what actually could have happened. (hide spoiler)] Shaken, I continued (after all it was a book group choice) but my confidence in the author was gone. I kept wondering... what other facts had Brennert twisted and contrived to suit his purposes? What would a kama'aina reader think of this book? Was the Hawaiian viewpoint misrepresented as well and I wasn't close enough to see it? What else had I missed? Should an outsider even attempt to write about a fundamentally foreign culture? It really made me aware of all the manipulative tricks the author had used; I could barely keep my mind on the last part of the novel.
Now, some readers just read for the fun of reading about an exotic land and they might say I am just being fussy, and that it is OK, or not really important that he misrepresented another culture's mindset. But people, we read historical fiction to learn about other times and cultures. What's the point if the author holds up a mirror instead of a window, and pretends otherwise? It's just a cheat. Brennert's mistake bothered me. It really did. Because when an author breaks faith with his reader...well, what else is left?
Post Script Nov 7th:
I've made some strongly worded criticisms calling Brennert to task for a key implausability in his story, which are concealed in the spoiler. For those who are curious, or who need more convincing, please check the comments, where I've linked to half a dozen articles supporting my views. Any discussion on how important the truth is in historical fiction is welcome (with the caveat that comments along the line of oh-it-is-just-fiction-so-anything goes will not be viewed as a seriously debatable position); disputing the claims from sources such as the L.A. Times/Japan Times/Time Magazine/The Department of State/The American Embassy in Japan/ The BBC/ The Seattle Times/Reuters in favor of personal stories not really relevant to the main topic, or opinions based more on wishful Western feelings rather than facts will not be responded to. Thanks!
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