Customer Reviews

Blackstrap Hawco

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I read about 600 pages of this book before I put it down in frustration. I only read this far because I kept thinking that surely the author had some purpose in writing such a long book and eventually I would be able to figure it out. But no, it just went on and on describing the life of an immigrant family in Newfoundland. A group of poor,mean, ignorant (and proud of it), unhappy people. The main character, Blackstrap Hawco, is typical of the group. Mentally unbalanced, he and his cohorts endure tragedy after tragedy, quite a few of them self induced. You would be hard pressed to find another group of such unlikeable characters.

I also didn't care for the author's style of jumping back in forth in time so much. This technique works well for some authors, but in this case, it just seems to add to the disconnectedness of the novel. The author also has a penchant for having his characters seeing ghosts; perhaps this is his way of emphasizing the fragile nature of the character's sanity. Whatever his purpose, I found this jarring, inserting a woo-woo factor in a gritty ugly reality just didn't work for me.

All in all, I'm sorry I wasted so much time on this book.