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A review by danbydame
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
4.0
I'm picking this for some pretty odd reasons:
1) it's been hanging around on the shelf for awhile. Time to bite the bullet and give it a go.
2) bite the bullet? Yes, it is 758 pages long. I can't let Emma be the only person in the house that reads bricks.
3) It is historical fiction, which is different than history-making fiction (Frankenstein) or hysterical fiction (Johannes Cabal).
4) While still about the Civil war (ish), it might be more to my liking than March.
I figure this one I can definitely give a 100 pages to suck me in, or I can ditch it with no guilt, like I should have done with Moby Dick.
Here goes nothing!
8/8: At last! I am done. The issue was not the book, but my calendar ... and the nightly Olympics.
This was a wonderful book. I was expecting something a bit more dry, more tightly woven with real history. I thought I was gong to get a dramatization of the Harper's Ferry raid and the lead-ups. It wasn't this at all. Then I thought it was going to be an origin story for a pivotal yet not well known figure in American history. It was only one third that. What it really is -- it is the story of a young man struggling (and failing) to be his own person under the shadow of a father named John Brown.
It is common to believe that John Brown's actions, rooted in his strong abolitionist and religious beliefs, triggered the Civil War. This story hypothesizes that John Brown was only the flashpowder ignited by his son, and for much less honorable reasons than love of God and fellow Man.
So many themes, so little time (for me). The two most interesting to me were
(1) the effect on a child of having a father like a John Brown. He was so intent on saving the world yet not "there" for his family. He wasn't there in the familiar sense as all his interactions were caught up in lecturing and sermonizing and teaching. And he wasn't there physically as his work and abolitionist goals kept him on the road. And further than that, John Brown was fully willing to sacrifice his family for his own ideals. Abraham and Isaac is a strong thread throughout the story.
(2) there are other kinds of slavery and Owen Brown was a slave of another kind -- a slave to his father, his father's ideals, his own yearning for fatherly approval, his own sense of responsibility to head the family in his father's absence. In other words, a slave of family. Just a darker way of stating "You can't pick your family" but you gotta love them?
1) it's been hanging around on the shelf for awhile. Time to bite the bullet and give it a go.
2) bite the bullet? Yes, it is 758 pages long. I can't let Emma be the only person in the house that reads bricks.
3) It is historical fiction, which is different than history-making fiction (Frankenstein) or hysterical fiction (Johannes Cabal).
4) While still about the Civil war (ish), it might be more to my liking than March.
I figure this one I can definitely give a 100 pages to suck me in, or I can ditch it with no guilt, like I should have done with Moby Dick.
Here goes nothing!
8/8: At last! I am done. The issue was not the book, but my calendar ... and the nightly Olympics.
This was a wonderful book. I was expecting something a bit more dry, more tightly woven with real history. I thought I was gong to get a dramatization of the Harper's Ferry raid and the lead-ups. It wasn't this at all. Then I thought it was going to be an origin story for a pivotal yet not well known figure in American history. It was only one third that. What it really is -- it is the story of a young man struggling (and failing) to be his own person under the shadow of a father named John Brown.
It is common to believe that John Brown's actions, rooted in his strong abolitionist and religious beliefs, triggered the Civil War. This story hypothesizes that John Brown was only the flashpowder ignited by his son, and for much less honorable reasons than love of God and fellow Man.
So many themes, so little time (for me). The two most interesting to me were
(1) the effect on a child of having a father like a John Brown. He was so intent on saving the world yet not "there" for his family. He wasn't there in the familiar sense as all his interactions were caught up in lecturing and sermonizing and teaching. And he wasn't there physically as his work and abolitionist goals kept him on the road. And further than that, John Brown was fully willing to sacrifice his family for his own ideals. Abraham and Isaac is a strong thread throughout the story.
(2) there are other kinds of slavery and Owen Brown was a slave of another kind -- a slave to his father, his father's ideals, his own yearning for fatherly approval, his own sense of responsibility to head the family in his father's absence. In other words, a slave of family. Just a darker way of stating "You can't pick your family" but you gotta love them?