It took me two tries to get through the book. The first time I picked it up, I put it aside after two chapters because it just didn’t speak to me at all. A few days later, I tried the novel again and, although I did finish it, I found myself dreading the alternating chapters that were set in the nineteenth century. The characters from those chapters are largely stereotypical cardboard cutouts needed to write the mini-thriller that allows three very different women to make their way from Louisiana to Texas in search of the plantation owner who fathered two of them (one by his wife, the other by his mulatto New Orleans mistress) and once owned the other.
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| Lisa Wingate |
Bottom Line: The Book of Lost Friends deserves a look if for no other reason than that it tells a part of the slavery story that few readers will have heard before now, and perhaps it is only because of the political and racial turmoil that the world finds itself in today that I wish Wingate had taken a more serious approach to it. Maybe it was simply written just a few months too soon for that to have happened.
Sounds interesting. I read a couple of books by this author over 10 years ago but, titles now escape me.
ReplyDeleteThe premise is an excellent one, but I think it's not well executed. The tone is just not right to me, and the historical chapters are hard to believe even though based on fact. But so many others love the book that maybe my expectations were just too high and I hoped it would be more than it is.
DeleteI don't love dual timelines because there's always one that's stronger than the other, and I often find myself skipping half the book because I'm only really interested in one of the stories. Sounds like this book has that problem.
ReplyDeleteIt did for me, anyway, Lark. The historical chapters were just so much more unrealistic than the chapters from the 1980s. Pretty much everyone in those chapters, with the exception of the three main characters, was either very good or very bad. And the countless narrow escapes were just too much for me.
DeleteNot that I was overly crazy about the predictable love story in the modern chapters...nor how easily a bunch of anti-school kids were turned into enthusiastic students without exception.
I'm bummed you didn't like this one more since I really loved it. I get your reasoning, though, and actually I agree - a non-fiction account on this subject might have worked better than fiction. Still, I enjoyed the book. For me, it was an interesting, entertaining read.
ReplyDeleteI did find it interesting, Susan. And I'm happy that I read it because otherwise I would probably never have learned this little piece of American history. You know how it goes sometimes. That's the great thing about book bloggers, the conversation that you don't see anyplace else.
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