Blood Kin: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mark Powell (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Powell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. He is the author of Prodigals, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2002. Born and raised in South Carolina, Powell lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 239 pages
• Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press; 1ST edition (September 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1572335467
• ISBN-13: 978-1572335462
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,084,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark and Beautiful, October 29, 2006

By 

Denton Loving (Speedwell, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blood Kin: A Novel (Hardcover)

BLOOD KIN is a dark but beautiful novel. Powell's prose is descriptive, poetic and full of meaning. His characters are wonderfully flawed and often enveloped in pain, but there is a simple beauty in them all. At the foundation of this novel are the ideas of family, love and, of course, God. Powell writes of finding God and love in "vacant hollows" and "empty pauses" and about the "difference between knowing and understanding." This novel is a maze of lives and activity as complex as real life. This is amazing literature.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, February 11, 2007

By 

Amy Blackmarr (New Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood Kin: A Novel (Hardcover)

Powell's voice is the most original I've read in years, and his prose is dead-on gorgeous. His is a wrenching, uncompromising, and undeniably Southern vision. It is a dark vision, but not unredeemed, and in my view he is not only a good writer, he is a great one. Blood Kin is a very good novel. It has wit, beauty, honesty, pain. I'm looking ahead to what is going to come from this author's pen in future years; but for now, if you want a gripping story told with an art and a clarity of perception that never falters, read this book.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Real Deal, October 15, 2007

By 

R. Blackwelder - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood Kin: A Novel (Hardcover)

Blood Kin is a novel about the Burden family and the struggles they endure after the Vietnam war. Will, the father, has a hard time with his sons fighting in the war, while the mother, Maddy, just wants some attention. The three sons: James, Roy and Enis, go through different struggles of their own from drug addictions to loving someone already engaged to feeling left out of the war by having no combat experience. This novel is one that critics called bleak, but I believe that is the point of the novel; to portray that everyone's life is not perfect and that everyone doesn't have a "fairy-tale ending." I thought it was a pleasant read and broke away from the staus quo of normal literature. In most novels, the ending is somewhat predictable and the ending for the most part ends decently for the main characters. It seems strange that I would call this a "pleasant read" because it is a sad story, but the way that Mark Powell includes such intimate details lures the reader in and makes the reader want to learn more about each character, even though they might not have the best situation possible. The stresses that the characters endure help channel the readers stresses through reading about the Burden troubles and realizing that their life may not be so bad. Overall, I liked this novel and would recommend it to anyone with an open mind and who is looking for a novel that is different from many others out there today.