Review: Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

Hillary Jordan won the Bellwether Prize for fiction from author Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Prodigal Summer, among many others), in recognition of literary merit and the novel's attention to social issues. TO be honest, this is the reason I decided to read it, because Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors of all time.

In Mudbound, Jordan explores the sharecropping south of the 1940's, a time of incredible paradox in the american south. One the one hand, regiments of african americans were fighting in WWII, fighting and dying alongside white soldiers to save the oppressed and hunted jewish (white) people. On the other, they themselves were oppressed, hunted people who returned to America to find their own status as unchanged. Even those who returned as decorated military veterans who had gained the respect and trust of their white european counterparts as human beings were still considered as animals in their own country.

Jordan highlights this paradox through a full-bodied cast of characters. Henry McAllen, a white military veteran, decides to act on a life-long desire to aquire a farm, to the shock of his wife Laura, who has never lived anywhere but the city. The shack and seemingly endless acres of mud, come with several families of sharecroppers, including the african-american Jackson family, whose son, Ronsel, is serving as a fighter pilot in the war. The arrival of Henry's charming brother, Jamie, at first appears to brighten the farm and counter the presence of the men's father, Pappy, whose heavy-handed attitude towards women and blatent racist hatred cast a blight on the entire family. When Ronsel returns from the war, however, Jamie's egalitarian attitude, coupled with his lure towards the furiously lonely Laura, ignite the powderkeg the farm has become, revealing an ugly truth and resulting in inevitable horror.

Jordan builds her story slowly, taking the time to flesh out each character's strengths as well as their less attactive hidden selves. Nothing is hidden, and in fact the different perspectives give the reader the ability to understand, if not accept, each person's motives and underlying insecurities. No one is blameless, and each bears the weight of the ultimate conclusion which, though not unexpected, is not for the faint of heart. As the characters are not spared from truth, neither is the reader.

This is an amazing debut novel, and it will be worth waiting to see what else Jordan is capable of.

Rating: five out of five stars; a vividly honest portrayal of an ugly part of American history

Review: Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

In Atkinson's fourth novel, main character and police officer-turned private detective Jackson Brodie investigates three London crimes while simultaneously trying to cope with the mystery his own life has become. His first case, involving the decades-old question of a missing preschooler, brings him into contact with the missing girl's three sisters, each one seemingly crazier and more emotionally warped than the next. The second, the unsolved murder of a local college student working her first day in her father's office, brought to him by a lonely and morbidly obese father obsessed with his youngest daughter's fate. His third job is more peripheral, involving a woman looking for her neice, whose mother is her convicted-murderer sister, and seems at first minor, but in the end provides a link tying the entire group together into one ugly package.

I don't usually read mystery fiction, partly because I'm impatient, and partly because it's rare that a novel can keep its cards close at hand enough for me to not know what's happening halfway through the book. Both instances leave me frustrated and annoyed. Case Histories, however, does manage to keep many of its secrets hidden until the last few chapters, and one in particular is a doozy. The reader knows from the beginning that, of course, these cases will be linked in some manner, so the discovery of the common thread isn't a surprise, and is in fact fairly obvious about 2/3 of the way through; it's the revelation of what happened to little Olivia, and the final take on the missing-neice situation, which has nothing to do with the neice at all, that are really the main attactions of the book.

Aside from the secrecy, another reason to enjoy the book is its partially-unsolved ending. There are a few strings left dangling, one in particular that could potentially come back to bite Bodie at a time when we are not there to learn of it. This left me thinking, considering what may come.

Luckily, there is another novel - One Good Turn - that will perhaps resolve the dangling pieces from Histories, in addition to introducing more.

Rating: four out of five stars - Increasingly interesting and likable characters, compelling secrets

Update

For those of you who do not read my other blog, I haven't been posting here as regularly because I have a) started working again, as a substitute teacher, and b) gone back to school, so I'm drowning in both trig and bio this semester. In the midst of all this, I'm working on my application and portfolio for admission to a master's in teaching program at a local university (hence the extra math and science credits, required by the university here). So, unfortunately, I'm going to cancel the book club, which truthfully wasn't going well anyway, but will continue to post reviews here when I can. I have managed to read a few books, but haven't had time to post, and most of them I wasn't impressed with, anyway. I did find wo more notable selections, however, and will discuss them soon. Thanks for being patient!