Topic: Slavery - The Eulogist and James

 I just finished two books that deal directly with slavery--both were gut wrenching, powerful, and left me angry that we are still fighting the racism, ignorance, self-righteousness, and greed associated with this most heinous thing. Sometimes if feels as if the Civil War will never end.

The Eulogist, by Terry Gamble, was the May selection for the GoodReads True Book Talk group. I wanted to provide the GoodReads blurb, but it contains way to many spoilers...glad I didn't read it before I read the book!  So basically, the story is about an Irish family that emigrates to the U.S. in the early part of the nineteenth century. 

The three children of the family--two sons and a daughter--make their way in Ohio, mainly Cincinnati. The main character is really the daughter, Olivia (aka Livvie), with older brother James marrying well and becoming a successful businessman, and the second brother, Erasmus, charming the socks and everything else off every female he encounters while trying his hand at revival preaching, ferrying people across the Ohio River, and sundry other things.

Livvie is a wonderful heroine--strong willed, plain, intelligent, and interested in how things work. She is a woman of science and a woman of conscience. Being a woman of conscience, she is compelled to try to help slaves to freedom, putting her own life and that of her family in danger. Being a woman of conscience requires being a woman of courage as well.

I will definitely be checking out other books by this author.

And then there's James, by Percival Everett. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in May, and it is clear why. Definitely the best book I've read this year and the best in a long time. 

James is the story of the slave Jim, Huck's companion in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Everett begins pretty much where Twain did, but the story of James--he rechristens himself--is so much more than Huck's sidekick. I don't want to provide a synopsis but suffice it to say that James's journey is convoluted--full of forward motion, backtracking, false starts, near escapes, heartbreaking and soul-wrenching loss, and the absolute certainty that he is a man of integrity, dignity, intelligence, and heart. James's journey is America's journey. Just as James's story didn't end with the last page of the novel, America's journey is ongoing as well, convoluted, full of false starts and stuttering steps.

I absolutely loved what the author did with language in this book. I'm not the biggest fan of dialect in books, but dialect in this book is essential to both the plot and the themes explored. Brilliant.