Customer Reviews

Blood Kin: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Blood Kin is a distressing and depressing book that I thoroughly enjoyed. It is a commentary on life and how happy endings don't always come through in the end. Most people would say that this book was too depressing and too bleak but the bottom line is that the storyline is real. The author took the ideas for this book from his real life and different things that are known to have happened. His characters are wonderfully developed throughout the entire story and make the reader feel compassion and anger for some of these characters. The voice is wonderfully simple and it embodies what the south is.
The Burden brothers are so wonderfully named and have such different personalities. There is at least one main issue that plagues each of them throughout the book. The issues they suffer from are basic with interesting and sometimes subtle twists. I enjoyed the anecdotes that were thrown in because they fit with the theme of the story but didn't necessarily contribute anything to the main storyline. The side stories added a different level of entertainment. The story ends in tragedy for most of the characters but it leaves a spark of hope in the form of one of the brothers. He made a great choice because even though the overall tone of the story is bleak it leaves a tiny ray of hope. As sad as it is, this is a more realistic portrayal of life and how events really occur.
Blood Kin is a great read and I would suggest it to anyone who enjoys the combination of thinking and entertainment. This book slowly draws the reader in with a mental death grip. The reader will find that the book is hard to put down and will not want to think about putting it down until they discover the ending for each of the characters. Do not get depressed upon reading the somewhat gloomy ending but realize that the author has left the reader with the same realization that Pandora had after she opened the box; that there is still hope. Read this book and enjoy.

Mark Powell's Blood Kin is a story about a family of war veterans. Will Burden, a pastor and Korean War veteran, is married to Maddy, and the two of them have three sons. All three of the sons go off to war at different times in the story. The oldest one, James, who was thought to be either dead or captured, returns and hides out for a while becoming addicted to drugs. The middle son, Roy, is in love with a woman who is promised to another man. The youngest one, Enis, is the only character that seems to have a decent life. The three brothers deal with love, drug addiction, alcoholism, and much more. During all of this, their father suffers some sort of mental or emotional breakdown, while Maddy is the rock of the family.
The chapters of Blood Kin move between the stories of the different characters. It is a very heart wrenching and emotional story. There is a lot of death and loss, and the story just does not turn out the way you want it to. If you are looking for a happy ending, then I would not recommend this book. The upsetting ending is almost surprising. While reading, I expected everything to end happily. I was surprised to find that that was not the case. Overall, it is an enjoyable book if you like to read about other people's misfortunes, which many people do, including me. If you do plan to read this book, I would stop before the ending if you are hoping for a happy one. Blood Kin left me disappointed at the end. However, Mark Powell is a wonderful writer and he has some great stories to tell. For the most part, it is worth the read.

Mark Powell has an uncanny ability to unfold things -- from the story line as a whole to the key individual pieces of information that are revealed in three or four separate bits that the reader suddenly pieces together with a revelatory "ah," and with just the right amount of timing in between abeyance and understanding.

The ending is somehow so true to the place, and so inevitable, despite the fact that the book is structured in an almost pixilated format. Call it an "inductive inevitability" -- piece of life here, a piece of life there, and together they make up not just the whole story and the place but the only story that seems possible given what the pieces are and the place that they make up. It's like there are two types of movement, not just time but accumulation as its own thing. And it's mirrored in the plot. And it always remains tight.

Powell's writing has the virtues of the best southern writing, but not the flaws. I spent a year in the South, and reading Blood Kin was at times almost uncomfortably like being back there again. The voice was so true, and it never wavered. But it never felt mannered: the writing only revealed the people who moved the plot, it never intruded.

I was late delivering a project because I started Blood Kin planning to read only an hour. I read all day, finished the book, went to sleep, and woke the next day with a final revelatory "ah" as I realized that my brain had missed a connection that it somehow found overnight.

I hate being faced with a choice of entertainment or literature. I want both in one, and in Blood Kin I got it.

the whole book is a series of interconnected, side stories containing absolutely no plot. it revolves around the main charecter james, but nothing ever happens. the book is filled with profound and incredibly detailed insigh, but it gets to a point where the whole thing just turns to "mush". 237 pagess later, I was still waiting for something (ANYTHING) to happen. there was an overwhelming amount of emotion conveyed, but unfortunately, I was never personally attached to any of the charecters due to his spastic writing style and lack of concrete action.