One of Woodrell’s earliest novels, it follows a fictional group of bushwhackers as they engage in the guerilla warfare of Quantrill’s Raiders in the Kansas-Missouri battles of the American Civil War. It blends real and made-up, and while it’s savage in its portrayal of the brutality where everyone was a son-of-a-bitch during the war, it kind of meanders and the pacing gets languorous.
Papa Was A Rolling Stone
A satisfying finale to the Bayou trilogy, we finally get to meet the Shade family patriarch, John X. Shade. This is, of course, as he flees home with his ten-year-old daughter Etta after her mother stole $47K from a psychotic gangster named Lunch and pinned it on John X. It’s wistful and woeful and violent as a motherfucker. In the hands of a lesser author, it would have been preachy and parabled. Here, it’s juuuuust right.
Daring? Not really, but a lot of fun.
Katie: After the debacle that was the shark shifter book, I felt like a palate cleanser was in order. LB Gregg’s sequel to Catch Me If You Can, Trust Me If You Dare, seemed like just the ticket – and it was, just as expected. I love that the author uses feisty to describe a male character. It’s not actually a gender specific word, but is so often used that way – especially in romance. And, let’s face it, Saysahr is nothing if not feisty. Now […]
Totalitarianism, up close and personal in post-Mao China
The Vagrants has got to be one of the grimmest novels I’ve read this year, and yet it is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The author grew up in Beijing of the late 1970s, the tumultuous post-Mao period in a China which had emerged from the horrific Cultural Revolution without plans to replace it with anything positive. The population was splintered between those whose humanity had been virtually destroyed by the bludgeon of Maoist doctrine, those who were struggling to enter the modern […]