MoFo Book Club: July 2022

I am thinking the same thing. But I also know there is a fine line between elegant writing and self-absorbed "look at meee!" writing. He's skating on the right side so far. So far. (I'm about 21% done.)

I have, though, found a handful of proofreading errors so far. Then again, I usually do.

__________________
Linda's Author Website
Linda's Amazon Author page

I did a little reading and found out this guy has no formal schooling/training when it comes to his writing. That's pretty awesome considering the results. 61 pages in and cruising along - I should finish this one up fairly quickly.

OK, am I correct in thinking Austruck is the last person to not have a book chosen for the club, or Thracian as well? In either case, we should next read a book chosen by someone who hasn't had a book picked yet...

__________________

I am somewhere around chapter 42, and was close to tossing this book in the DNF pile this morning. I will soldier on, but... we shall see if I make it through!

My copy finally arrived on Wednesday. Currently around chapter 22 . . . the same DNF thought flickered with me . . . building up all that momentum in the first book then simply dropping it; then jumping forward to start all over again with everyone 15 years older in the second book was a weird choice.

I finished it up.

I will hold my comments until Thracian finishes. I am back into the Moore book for now as I wait for the next title.

I'm still chipping away at it, after having to get a replacement copy. I've also just been really busy and my leisure reading time has been shorter this month. I feel bad because it was my suggestion! I'm trying to finish it this week.

Ah, don’t feel bad, that’s just some of Malvina’s lingering hoodoo.

Finished this yesterday.

I'm close, but not quite done yet.

Please go ahead and discuss if you want.

Again, I apologize for not finishing in a timely manner.

I will say this about it, in mostly a good way it has managed to consistently surprise me.

First of all, I liked the dense prose. The previous books seemed to have had churned out feel, like after they got an outline accepted by a publisher, six months later they delivered a final draft, this one feels like it was re-written, re-tooled, puzzled over.

I liked the evocative title, I was hoping for an explication, and near the end we get one. The reporter hears (some of the wiser) residents around him in his neighborhood are boarding up for the impending hurricane. He likens it to the sound of building coffins, yet these are their homes and afterwards when the storm has passed they will return to live in their . . . caskets.

The author also took actual elements and people from New Orleans history. The mass lynching of 1891. There actually was a Buddy Bolden who took the ragtime sound into jass, then others moved the jass sound into jazz. When some yankee music company up north offered the black musicians a chance to record, but they all passed on the deal but Dominick Carolla of the Jim Jan Jump orchestra agreed to their offer and scored himself a little early fame.

Okay, finally completely finished!

This post will contain MAJOR SPOILERS!!!


Ultimately I really liked this novel. I thought that the characters were well developed and, like I said earlier, it packed quite a few surprises. That sequence with Jim, Dropsy, and West felt like it came out of nowhere, even though there had actually been some good foreshadowing.

I was also not prepared for what happened to the various Morningstars around the 300 page mark.

Now, at first I was kind of mixed on the last 100 pages. It felt a bit too cutesy having the reporters basically spell out and confirm what we'd seen right before and it felt too meta.

But what really salvaged it for me was the very final sequence, told from the point of view of Nobody, in which we finally learn about his part in it all and specifically why he's so keen on finding "his fish."

A solid + for me. It took me a little while to get through the book, but I didn't dislike it. It was the kind of writing that I wanted to take a bit slower to make sure I was picking up on all that was being said.