Cane River, by Lalita Tademy, for example, is one of those books. I will admit it: When I saw this cover at the Goodwill Bookstore, it fell into my hand like it was metal and I was Magneto. Look at the cover.
Doesn't that look enticing? It looks like it is going to tell you a rich story, and pull you in and leave you wishing there was a sequel. Not so much. It is very roughly based on a true story...ish? The author based it on her genealogy, after quitting her job to trace it. It started because of her great grandmother, Emily, who being genetically more white than black showed favoritism to her lighter grandchildren. The author felt a need to know what made Emily become Emily, and so she traced the family line back 3 generations. The story starts with Emily's grandmother, Suzette, as a 9 year old, and Suzette's mother, Elizabeth, living and working as slaves. It works forward through the generations until it reaches the author's grandmother.
Prior to this book, the author's career was founded in the corporate world. I am not saying that every author has to live their entire lives being authors. I am just saying that this one, Lalita Tademy, is not a natural author. The words feel very awkward and mechanical in the beginning. They tell a story, yes, but but they are not rhythmic, warming, or inviting words. It reads very much like you were looking at her family tree and reading short paragraph summaries about each person's life: Suzette-house slave, raped by white man, had two babies, sold. In the author's defense, she did write with better flow than that, but it rarely moves the reader to become emotionally involved. Often, Lalita Tademy uses written portions from documents she found in her search, such as letters. It was a good idea, however, it clashes horribly with her writing. For example, she copied a letter written in response to her great-great-great-grandfather's letter, but she did not have the letter that he had written, so she had to make it up. The difference in letter style and eloquence is staggering. She may have tried to mimic the style, but she failed, and the mix of the eloquently written documents, and her mechanical style is quite jarring to the reader.
In Lalita Tademy's defense, the closer the story gets to the present, the better the characters become. Maybe it is because she had half a book to develop her writing style before that, but my theory is that the closer she got to present day, the more elderly people she had in the family to glean memories from. The people she heard about from the elderly people definitely have more character depth than the people she had little more than names and sales registries. Even the characters that started without character gained character the closer they got to her elders' memories.
My favorite character was adult Philomene, the daughter of Suzette. Really, if the book only told about Philomene's story, it would have been a great book. Philomene started as a slave, daughter of a white man, was sold multiple times due to deaths of masters. In reaction to the civil war's ravages on the South, she ended up nearly living as an equal with her mistress in order for the household of 2 women and 7 children to survive.
Philomene made some very calculating decisions that, in the long run, were the redemption of her family after freedom, even though the present sacrifice was such that most women would have forgone the decision. When the war ended, her daughter, Emily, was two, and had no real experience of slavery. This lead to a very interesting observation within the story about the generation gap between ex-slaves and born-free children. A year after being granted freedom, Philomene picked up her children and left to seize it. Because of her earlier and continuing calculating decisions she was able to gain a sharecrop to work until she was able to gain her own property. She united a majority of her family, which and been scattered some ten years before at an auction. Her children were privately tutored and given every training they might need to survive in an upper class world. It really was amazing what this woman accomplished, starting at the age of 17.
Unfortunately, her story is smack dab in the middle of the 416 page book. After her is Emily's story until Emily is 60 years old, and the tying up of lose ends to explain where the grandchildren had scattered.
The book is interesting to an extent, because there are actual photos of many of the people, and also copies of the papers used to learn Lalita Tademy's family history, such as slave auction receipts, news paper articles, hand written (in French) letters and census records.
If I were rating this book on Amazon, it would get 3/5 stars(Well, ideally 2.5/5, but Amazon doesn't allow that option). I would not recommend this book to a friend if they asked me for a good read. It is not the worst book I have ever read. Like I said, it has some interesting moments. I just do not feel the interesting moments redeem the mechanical writing style, the predominance of one dimensional characters, and the sheer drudgery of Cane River.
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