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A review by balletbookworm
The Fields by Erin Young
3.0
A mystery novel set in Black Hawk County! In Iowa! Wow! 70 miles north of me!
Well....this was....fine. it's clearly the first in a series, being overstuffed with set-up for later books that had no payoff in this plot (I know blurbs oversell but "beautifully written and masterfully crafted" this is not). The plot itself is baggy in the first 2/3 and then the last 1/3 is Criminal Minds + a Robin Cook novel + ??cannibals??. Riley Fisher as a main character is interesting, but needs rounded out.
As an Iowan, I will tell you this book is clearly written by someone who has never actually lived in Iowa for any length of time. A description of the Cedar River "shining like steel" had me snorting. Also, no one watches the Hawkeyes on TV at a bar in July, particularly not in Black Hawk County which is Panther territory, because most of the baseball games aren't televised (and those bars probably aren't shelling out for a Big Ten Classics Channel subscription); football, which is basically what anyone in this state means when you say "the Hawkeyes" doesn't start until the end of August. There are Britishisms scattered throughout the book (maybe editorial caught those, since I read a digital galley that has been up on Edelweiss for almost a year at this point). And, this will sound kind of weird, but this book is too white. Black Hawk County might be rural and mostly white, but the city of Waterloo itself has a considerable population of Black and Latinx Iowans who seemed conspicuously absent. (I'm currently trying to see if any booksellers from our Waterloo store have read the book and what they think about it. You might think I'm being hypercritical but we get so few books set here. And you can tell who has lived here and who thinks we're just a headline/plotbunny when agriculture comes up.)
CW for extreme gore, cannibalism, violence against women, rape, sexism/misogyny, political corruption, police violence
Well....this was....fine. it's clearly the first in a series, being overstuffed with set-up for later books that had no payoff in this plot (I know blurbs oversell but "beautifully written and masterfully crafted" this is not). The plot itself is baggy in the first 2/3 and then the last 1/3 is Criminal Minds + a Robin Cook novel + ??cannibals??. Riley Fisher as a main character is interesting, but needs rounded out.
As an Iowan, I will tell you this book is clearly written by someone who has never actually lived in Iowa for any length of time. A description of the Cedar River "shining like steel" had me snorting. Also, no one watches the Hawkeyes on TV at a bar in July, particularly not in Black Hawk County which is Panther territory, because most of the baseball games aren't televised (and those bars probably aren't shelling out for a Big Ten Classics Channel subscription); football, which is basically what anyone in this state means when you say "the Hawkeyes" doesn't start until the end of August. There are Britishisms scattered throughout the book (maybe editorial caught those, since I read a digital galley that has been up on Edelweiss for almost a year at this point). And, this will sound kind of weird, but this book is too white. Black Hawk County might be rural and mostly white, but the city of Waterloo itself has a considerable population of Black and Latinx Iowans who seemed conspicuously absent. (I'm currently trying to see if any booksellers from our Waterloo store have read the book and what they think about it. You might think I'm being hypercritical but we get so few books set here. And you can tell who has lived here and who thinks we're just a headline/plotbunny when agriculture comes up.)
CW for extreme gore, cannibalism, violence against women, rape, sexism/misogyny, political corruption, police violence