Customer Reviews

Wilderness Run: A Novel

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

 

 

This is a good rainy weekend book, full of enough gory battles to keep you
riveted and enough warm domestic scenes to stop you from feeling guilty for
sipping your third hot chocolate. Beautiful writing, great historical
detail.

there are few civil war novels that stand above the crowded field. most hobble themselves with buddy-picture-like male cameraderie that fails to invoke the true spirit of an age that at least for the middle and upper middle class was more concerned with the etherial and transcendant than back slapping brotherhood. ms. hummel evokes the suffering, the dread, the gothic din and the warmth of the period better than any recent effort.

I thought the book was a fine first novel. The language was well-crafted and vivid, the characters felt real and unpredictable, and the story kept me reading continuously. There were moments that felt a bit preachy or sentimental, for example, the various talks among the soldiers about fighting for the freedom of all men, and so forth, but those conversations struck me as things that Civil War soldiers might actually say, a level of sentimentality that was present at the time, and, while a bit out of place in our society today, perfectly reasonable for the era Hummel was writing about. I came away from the novel with its characters still on my mind, some of the lines and images still reverberating for me. In all, a very good reading experience.

This was the kind of book that left me thoughtful and satisfied like those books I read in my teens on Saturday mornings curled up and never going downstairs to start the day. I can't wait for Hummel to write more books. She mixes insight and poetry well. It is as if she talked first hand with those who recalled specific Civil War experiences and then wrote them into this novel.

This book is a welcome new addition to Vermont fiction. As the wealthy
children of lumber barons, Isabel and Laurence Lindsey are well-drawn and
without the stereotypical traits that sometimes accompany Vermont
literature. Rather than hard-bitten, laconic types who secretly have hearts
of gold, they are real young people who make mistakes and whose innocence is
shattered by the events of their time. With her lyrical descriptions of the
winter landscape and her detailed knowledge of the time period, Hummel has
created a new and fascinating world.

There is such beautiful writing in this book, from the first scenes on the
Vermont lake through to the last moments in the Washington hospital. I felt
like I traveled so far with the Lindsey family and it will be a long time
before I forget Laurence and Isabel and their experiences. Despite choosing
a fairly traditional character trajectory--rich young man goes off to
war--Hummel has created a deeply original story about a family shattered by
a pivotal moment in our country's history. It's the details that make what
she writes ring true, the soldier who carves a ship piece by piece and
smuggles them out to the woods to assemble, the brutal episode of capturing
a hog in the forest, and on the domestic front, a girl reciting Shakespeare
at a party on the day the news comes home about the rout at Bull Run. You
don't have to be a Civil War buff to love this novel, but you do have to
want to escape the contemporary landscape of navel-gazing relationship books
into a fictional world with grand and serious scope

This first novel comes from a young writer who seems to understand how to write beautiful sentences. With a voice both lyrical and precise, this book starts out with a masterfully realised and shocking set up involving two young Vermonters encountering a runaway slave. This is the jumping off point for a lushly written exploration of early America. In prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier or maybe even Michael Ondaatje, but written by a young woman, this book reminded me of what I love about "real" writers. This book is proof that there are female writers out there under thirty who are writing ambitious novels and not only mediocre Sex and the City knock-offs. There's certainly room for the sex-starved woman in the city books, but it's refreshing to read a good old-fashioned something-to-chew-on novel.

There is is some good writing here. A strong sense of place and time, and the details of battle and life for the Civil War soldier. But I felt let down by the lack of depth of the characters. They read to me as flat and unconvincing, as if they were going through the motions for an author not seasoned enough to grasp nor convey the complexities of the era and the love affair. It felt as if it was trying to ride the coattails of previous Civil War novels of late, ie: COLD MOUNTAIN and IN THE FALL. Perhaps this was at first a love story and the publisher thought it might be a good marketing device to capitalize on the Civil War trend. But that trend, really a fad, is in steep decline and I'd rather read a love story that is simply that without it trying to have more importance than it does. Much of the novel smacked of MFA transparency and lack a real voice. The protagonist read as a rich young man of advantage who learns through war that, oh my!, life is hard for others! And racism actually exists. I hope the writer has a better story to hang her pretty good writing on next time.

"Wilderness Run: A Novel" sounded like a great novel from the dust jacket. Civil war, romance, historicalness, you name it. Then the story began. I was interested in where it was going, with it starting with the relationships of Bel and Laurence's parents, then to the cousins Bel and Laurence, and then to their separate lives in the war and at home, and then onto Bel and her tutor Louis. There were so many relationships intertwined with each other, but development was scarce and then just abandoned. I wanted more relationship growth between Laurence and Bel and Bel and Louis, but I was left disappointed. Then author Maria Hummel threw in the past triangle between Bel's mother, Faustina, and Laurence's father, George. Hummel was trying for a very rich symbolic way of writing, but she came off as artsy, and she expected her readers to grasp her method. I also sensed that she did not know which plot to expound upon. I do admit that I was at times disturbed by the war descriptions. The ending left me very disappointed, and made me ponder the entire point of the story. I was sorely disappointed. I do not recommend.