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nancyflanagan 's review for:
The Women of the Copper Country
by Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell knows how to write historic fiction. She knows how to make characters real and relatable, personalize historic events and surround both with motives and principles. I read the book with my iPad, looking up characters (real or made up or composites) and events and even text from historic documents. She gets it right, time and time again, with beautiful or infuriating quotes, and scenes that ring with truth, whether they happened or not. It helps that she's such a lucid and imaginative writer.
I was especially interested in this book because it takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, although I was clueless about the copper miners' strike, Anna Clemenc, and the Italian Hall disaster of 1913. In her thoroughly engaging afterword, Russell says that the events and people still divide the town of Calumet, and I don't doubt it. One hundred years is not enough to erase horror and shame, in a remote small town, where half the year is winter.
It's also an excellent book to read RIGHT NOW, as we are experiencing what happens when the rich and privileged are given free rein to squeeze and exploit the poor and disadvantaged. James MacNaughton, the manager of the Calumet and Hecla mining operation in Calumet, is as noxious as any villian in fiction, but he was a real person. Moreover, everyone reading the book can identify a real-life person--probably a politician or CEO-- whose world view aligns perfectly with MacNaughton's.
This is a masterpiece. Five solid stars.
I was especially interested in this book because it takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, although I was clueless about the copper miners' strike, Anna Clemenc, and the Italian Hall disaster of 1913. In her thoroughly engaging afterword, Russell says that the events and people still divide the town of Calumet, and I don't doubt it. One hundred years is not enough to erase horror and shame, in a remote small town, where half the year is winter.
It's also an excellent book to read RIGHT NOW, as we are experiencing what happens when the rich and privileged are given free rein to squeeze and exploit the poor and disadvantaged. James MacNaughton, the manager of the Calumet and Hecla mining operation in Calumet, is as noxious as any villian in fiction, but he was a real person. Moreover, everyone reading the book can identify a real-life person--probably a politician or CEO-- whose world view aligns perfectly with MacNaughton's.
This is a masterpiece. Five solid stars.