Customer Reviews

Nashborough: A Novel

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I usually love long family sagas and had great expectations for Nashborough. This novel started out well enough, but I just skimmed the final third...

My main problem was that none of the principal characters were likable or even that interesting. The sister, jasmine, who sleeps with her brother-in-law (all the while emphasizing the value of family!) critisizes her sister's wedding. The family is rather cold amongst each other, yet places themselves above all others. To them anyone else is an outider. When an alcoholic brother leaves his young bride and their children they assume the wife must have been boring!? What kind of family is this!?

Other than such meanness (clannishness they call it). Not a lot happens. This is surprising since the novel spans much of the turbulent twentieth century. Major events such as WWII and the Depression are mentioned, but really do not impact these selfish people.

I wish this had been better. By the way, Rona Jaffe's The Road Takes is a much more pleasant family saga!

This was simple mean spirited & tedious.

"Nashborough" goes down as smoothly as a nip of mint julep on a hot Tennessee day. It is a fine, stately novel, written with a grace and intelligence that makes it read more like an English family saga than an American one. Not surprising, considering that author Elsie Burch Donald is a transplanted southerner living in England and France.

There's something satisfyingly old fashioned about this book, which is refreshing in this day of the overheated Southern family saga. Characters are developed with care into surprising people, and while the plot covers a lot of ground it does so at the right pace. Donald has caught the rhythms of the long hot afternoons, the family expectations, and the maneuvering to keep up with a changing world.

There are plenty of unexpected turns in "Nashborough" and the novel will keep you engaged from start to finish. Take this book and find a good hammock. This is an elegant way to pass some late summer afternoons.

Nashborough, in television mini-series fashion, follows the lives of two early prominent families in the fictional Southern town of Nashborough. It follows the two families from their pre-Roaring '20s days of wealthy privilege, through the crash of the great depression and all the way up to an unidentified recent time period.
It is a grand attempt (400+ pages) at an epic novel that covers historical fiction of the South, an interesting plot, and social commentary of the issues that faced the South in the 20th century.
At moments, it does each of these very well. The final 100 or so pages present page-turning fiction at its best. It deftly presents social commentary in spurts throughout the book (I especially enjoyed the book's subtle but effective treatment of Blacks in the South). And it's capture of certain historical elements is impressive.
This book, however, does not do any of the above consistently enough to make it a recommended read. The book begins dreadfully slowly with little real action or intrigue until its midpoint. Only through dogged determination and professional pride did I reach the last part of this book that made the novel worthwhile.
I never found a character that was truly likeable. As the characters deal with life's ups and downs, admirable traits are greatly overshadowed by human failings. As a general rule, the characters never resolve the errors that bring them such personal grief and end up dead or unfulfilled.
Realistic though this novel may be, its plot becomes depressing and hopeless. Even the only antebellum mansion that gets restored to its former beauty becomes a ruin in the end.
The author seems to have strived for an epic novel but took on more than can be done well in one novel. The brief glimpses of the historical periods were unfulfilling and disappointingly brief. The use of historical snippets to bolster the setting are too brief to provide a true setting. And the dropping of historical names becomes irritating.
An impressive freshman debut, Nashborough leaves me looking forward to future, less-ambitious projects by Elsie Burch Donald. But, in Nashborough, she took on more than can be handled deftly.

I love family sagas, and for the most part for me the longer the book the better. I love the way that the characters develop and interact with each other, and in a truly well written family saga there is the added attraction of major world historical events to put their lives into perspective. Alas, this book has very little of this.

The interesting characters are there, sure enough, but we learn almost nothing of them. They have joys and terrible tragedies, and these are all glossed over as we march through the years. There is no true development of the lives of the families - they are all entirely superficial. Even when one of the main characters goes to war and becomes famous for his heroics, this is dealt with in one or two paragraphs.

The author certainly has talent, and I'm sure it will develop, but this is a very disappointing effort, and I struggled to finish it. Even then I got the impression that she was in a hurry to finish the book. There are far superior family sagas on the market.

I have an inexplicable fascination with the South, so I'm often drawn to books that are set there. And this book does give a detailed depiction of upper-class Southern life (how accurate, I don't know). But it's soooooo slow! And there are so many characters you'll be glad that there's a glossary listing them in the back of the book.

Because of the large cast of characters, there is very little character development. It's hard to feel connected with any of them as they fritter about, having babies and drinking endless pitchers of martinis.