The House Girl – Tara Conklin

     This is a story told in two parts. It switches between the antebellum south circa 1852 and modern New York. First year associate at a prestigious law firm, Lina Sparrow, is tasked with finding the perfect client to be the face of a class action law suit to demand reparations for the descendants of American slaves.  Josephine Bell is a house slave on a struggling Virginia plantation. They are tied together by Josephine’s owner, Lu Anne Bell. After Lu Anne Bell’s death, her paintings and drawings were found and she was held up as a revolutionary before her time. Now, nearly 150 years later, her art is being called into question. Some claim it was done by Josephine since no rich, white, plantation owner could know the life of a slave so intimately. In this controversy, Lina thinks she may have found her perfect client as long as she can connect him to Josephine’s bloodline. Her only problem is Josephine disappeared shortly before her mistress’s death.

     This story sounds intriguing. The reparations aspect, a little family drama in Lina’s story, trying to find Josephine’s descendants, and the story of Josephine’s life itself should have combined to make a wonderful enriching story. The keywords there are should have. What we get instead is a story that pretty much goes nowhere. Lina is wondering about her mother and the history behind her death while searching for evidence of what happened to Josephine’s child and just does some of the dumbest stuff. Trying to seduce her mother’s former lover, a man old enough to be her father; not bothering to check for newspaper articles; not looking up the death certificate at department of vital statistics that as a lawyer should have been her second stop; or avoiding her dad when he spent the whole book trying to tell her the truth are not the acts of an intelligent, educated person. The law firm didn’t want the descendant of Josephine as the face of their law suit because he was “too white.” They needed someone “darker” to make it look good and, three quarters of the way through the book, the whole case was dropped for the flimsiest of reasons. Lina keeps doing the research though because she” must” have answers to the mystery of Josephine.  I won’t spoil any more of the story but the whole of Josephine’s story is unbelievable in the extreme. It’s not quite as bad Lina’s but it is still pretty awful.

     The writer has apparently never heard of normal colors, geography, research. If something is brown, its coffee colored. Blue eyes and/or blonde hair are described as pale and anything else is “dark.” The shadows were dark, the wood was dark, the house was dark, and all of the women’s hair and eye colors were dark except for Josephine’s (which were blue aka unusual) and anyone who was blonde. Every time Lina thought about her mother, it was the same paragraph about her fragrance, her laugh, her warm rich tones, almost as if it were copied and pasted every time the mother's name was written. The writer felt the need to print three entire pages of names while Lina was doing research into slave families trying to find a descendant. Three Pages! and then had the gall to finish the passage with “and the list went on and on.” There was no need for three pages of names, a dozen names would have done the job. I am fairly sure the author was trying to make a point about how ridiculously awful slavery was but we already know and understand how terrible it was. The author clearly did little to no research about the areas outside of New York that she was writing about. At one point Lina visits Richmond, Va. and travels to a town (that in reality) is 3 hours away. In the book, it’s an easy 45 minute drive, plus she keeps spelling one of the town names wrong. Yes, it’s pronounced Stanton but it’s spelled Staunton. As a whole, it took an interesting basis for a story and goes nowhere while being repetitious in the extreme and getting basic geography wrong. If I ever read this book again, it will be too soon.

Tilted World – Tom Franklin and Beth Fennelly

     I’ve been borrowing tons of books from the library on my kindle lately. The Tilted World was one title I picked up. At first, I was afraid it was going to be one of those Christian fiction novels that masquerade as something I would actually want to read. I was not only pleasantly surprised; I was blown away with the intensity of this story.

     Dixie Clay, a recently bereaved mother and the best moonshiner in the state, takes in an orphan that was found by undercover revenue agents during a shootout.  Little does she or the revenuers suspect, the missing agents they are searching for were killed by Dixie’s husband. With the waters of the Mississippi River rising fast and saboteurs on dam, will Dixie be able to turn in her abusive gangster husband to the revenuers and evacuate with her new child in time? Will the revenuers be able to find the moonshiners, find their colleagues’ murderer, and stop the saboteurs before the town is lost? You’ll have to find out for yourself because I’m not giving away anything else.

     This book was amazing. It managed to tell a compelling story with realistic characters extremely well. I felt so bad for Dixie and her orphan. I wished it was possible to be friends with Ingersoll. The back story portions for various characters weren’t overly and gave just enough information to continue the story without breaking the mood of the “present.” The atmosphere is almost tangible. The whole thing feels like watching an old black and white film instead of reading a novel. I was not familiar with either of the two authors but a little bit of easy detective work reveals that both are fairly well known and married to each other in the bargain. I’m looking forward to finding more of their work. Even if they don’t collaborate on any other projects, they’ve managed to create a masterpiece with this novel. 

Redemption of Althalus

     This book starts with the adventures of a thief having a run of bad luck. Unfortunately, even when he reaches the place he calls home, things don’t really go right for him. He gets roped into stealing a book from an unoccupied house. Sadly for him, the house isn’t quite as unoccupied as he’s been told. It contains a goddess masquerading as a cat. As the story progresses, they recruit a group of people to help combat the forces of the goddess’s brother, who are trying to unmake the world. Over the course of two years, the group fights the enemy generals one by one and leads their group to victory.

     I really enjoy this book. This is the last of the good Eddings fantasy novels. The Dreamers series that Eddings’ wrote after this book pretty much took the plot from this one, made slight changes to the main characters and stretched it into three books. Despite the length of it, much of the “traveling” is left out. All the scenes have some kind of significance to them. There’s a lot of recap time with the various forces and army commanders about what everyone else is doing and the fact they are working for deities is an open secret. Taking this book by its parts, this is substandard. The plot is typical, the characters act like every other character in every other fantasy novel, and the villains are unintelligent. Although something about the way David and Leigh Eddings put together the story still makes it an entertaining read and my second favorite of their novels. Maybe it’s that despite all the clichés, there’s more humanity in the characters and situations than many of the new books that are coming out now. I can relate to the girl who wants to hurt her father’s murderer, the thief who misses his friends of the past, the chronically hungry teenager even. This novel is very representative of their other works and it’s a good choice if you don’t want to commit to a 6-10 book series purchase but want to try them out. 

Sorry again.

It's been a while. My computer died and I had to wait for it to be fixed/replaced. Apparently crashing computers is a theme for me when I want to do stuff online. That being said, I have read about a million books the past few months and have another stock pile of reviews so I should be posting fairly regularly for a good long bit. We are moving in a few months but that shouldn't stop the updates.