Cane River by Lalita Tademy
Book description
Lalita Tademy was a successful corporate vice president at a Fortune 500 company when she decided to embark upon a task to uncover her family’s past. Through exhaustive research, interviews, and the help of professional genealogists, she would find herself transported back to the early 1800s, to an isolated, close-knit rural community onLouisiana’sCaneRiver.
Book review
Being part of a multi-racial multi-cultural family, I was interested to read this book as my own history has links in slavery. It was an Ophra Book Club recommendation, which in my opinion can be a hit or a miss. Although I enjoyed reading this story on one level it was quite a disappointment as the writer did not describe the emotions of the characters very well. They came over as very one dimensional. We know exactly what the caracters looked like and what happened to them but not much of what they felt in somewhat highly charged emotional situations. There are also leaps of time when one chapter ends and years have passed when you start the next chapter, which is fine if you get an explanation but this was not the case. The writer took on a very difficult task of tracing her family roots from slavery to freedom and it is apparent that they were a family of incredibly strong women.
This is not really a strictly historical book and not really fiction, it falls somewhere in between. It is a fictitious story about a real family, and does not have enough substance to bring the characters into your life. This subject genre has been covered numerous times by much more experienced writers who allow you to feel what the characters are going through. The very positive reviews given to this book at the time of publishing are not merited in my opinion, it is a pretty average read.
Cane River by Lalita Tademy,
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