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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Has some great moments, but drags in places, March 2, 2006
I'm glad that I read this book, although there were a number of places where I felt that the author should have picked up the pace in order to maintain momentum and reader interest. While this novel is a crime drama, the fact that it deals with matters of race, trust and the elusive nature of truth makes it worthy of more consideration than the usual page turner.
I won't recount the plot, as an outline of the action is easily available elsewhere. I would like to single out a couple of passages, though, because they highlight the elegant prose that Richard Price is capable of and also struck a chord with me in that I have encountered similar situations in my own experience.
Take, for example, the opening of chapter 11, "The Dempsey County jail stood half demolished, and the only surviving section of exterior wall, the southwest corner, was a grotesquely defiant crumble of plaster and brick, a raised fist thrust into the flawless blue of a hot summer morning. The prison bars, running the entire length of the building but hidden from view for ninety years by a sooty gray facade, had now, in these final days, revealed the building for what it truly had been: a seven story cage."
The beauty of the writing, combined with the startling and rather violent imagery of the fist and the cage, made a strong impression on me and bore home the stark reality that jails are cages in which we shut up our fellows like animals, often when they are innocent. I have not read many other novels that are so evocative and at the same time hard hitting.
Another passage that really hit home with me is this one, near the end of the book, which is an excerpt of a conversation between two black men, one a cop and the other a suspect: "I don't know too many bald-faced crackers, to be honest. I mean...but still, it's like most white people -- for me -- I feel like they're not so much talking to me as they're *watching* themselves talk to me -- like, admiring themselves talking to me -- and I play this guessing game. How many minutes into this conversation -- no matter what we're talking about right now -- could be sports, the market, could be the weather -- but how many minutes is it gonna take for *race* to come up. How long is it gonna take for the fact that it's a white person talking to a black person to take over and change the subject, turn the subject into something racial. It never fails. *Never.* And I don't know how you deal with it, but for me it's nerve-racking, and it's boring."
This blew me away, and I found myself thinking back to recent conversations I had with black people, hoping that I didn't do that, but having this underlying worry that maybe I did. The interactions among people in day to day life are never simple, but race makes everything more complex and I really appreciate the way that Price acknowledges that fact.
For me, Price didn't over dramatize or over emphasize the role that race plays in all situations, never mind something as volatile as the disappearance of a child. And his characterizations seem dead on, not only for those characters who exemplified people I have met in my own life, but for characters who I can only imagine knowing. Take the creepy Friends of Kent, for example, who are a group of volunteers who search for missing kids. The personalities of these folks seem very believable, as does the character of Brenda, the mother who is the centerpiece of the story.
Overall, I recommend this book to those who enjoy a provocative character study. But if you're looking for a good crime thriller, Freedomland is probably a bit heavier than you really want. This is actually a story about a woman's denial of her failure to be a good parent, and the shattering results that her denial entails for many others in her community.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too much and not enough, January 18, 2000
By A Customer
Like many of the others who have reviewed this book, I felt like it started out promisingly enough. It seemed like a nice, little ripped from the headlines drama with some open-ended observations about race and poverty and the enormous cultural and experiential divide that separates the haves from the have nots. But, apparently, that early promise was built on characters of sand, because they and their stories became a bit of an endless loop of shell-shocked realization and sweating inertia. If I were to give Price the benefit of the doubt I would say that his character's inability to act effectively, say anything succinctly or solve even the most basic of their own problems was a purposeful mirror held up to urban America. Hamlet-like, Price's characters wallow and writhe and go mad, and when they act, they do the wrong thing. Perhaps, he meant his character's sluggishness to be representative. Maybe he meant us to feel as trapped in the Armstrong Houses, in poverty, in addiction, in stupidity, in injustice as the characters who live there. If that was his intent, he definitely succeeded. At some point, however, it got to be too much. All the characters just allowed themselves to be buffeted about by circumstance until I felt like screaming. The character of the reporter, Jesse was the worst of the offenders. I found myself hoping that I would be provided front row seats to something really terrible happening to her. To sum up, I felt that this book had some structural problems. But, maybe this long road to nowhere is as good a metaphor for race relations in America as any other.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing, April 17, 2003
Hmmmm....with all due respect, I think some of the other reviewers here are missing the point. You don't pick up a 700+ page novel and not gear up for a long read, and if you know Price at all, you know he's not your standard thriller writer (which is a good thing, believe me). I'm a little mystified by the Price fan that didn't like it though--seems like we were reading two different books. And why see the titles of soul music songs in the book as a tired racial comment rather than the product of a character's completely deranged mind? At any rate, I found Freedomland to be an astounding achievement, with beautifully drawn fully human characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, plenty of action and tension, and a bone-deep sadness beneath it that's miles away from the prickly optimism of Clockers. Unlike Price's recent excellent Samaritan, it's not emotionally claustrophic either--Freedomland is in fact a modern urban epic, rich in character, depth, and texture. This is a book I continually recommend to people who believe that commercial fiction can't stir the soul. I will grant that reading Freedomland can ultimately be an emotionally exhausting experience, but that is what I look for in books--to paraphrase Kafka (at least I think it was Kafka), a book should be the axe that breaks the frozen lake inside us. And Freedomland is a great big axe.
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