My First Rejection of the Year

 

I've read some good books so far this year. But I found one I just can't go any further with - Cherokee America by Margaret Verble. 

It sounds like something I would really enjoy - a story about a strong woman raising her family in the Cherokee Nation about 10 years after the end of the Civil War. And look at that cover! That's what makes this so disappointing, I guess. I've read 5 or so chapters, and there is no sign of a plot thread that will carry the story through. Every chapter focuses on something a different character is doing, and it's usually something pretty mundane. For example, last night, the chapter I read had the main character, Cherokee (nicknamed Check), having her nightly meetings with each of her 5 sons. I didn't see anything in it that seemed to point toward a larger plot. Maybe Verble was using that as a way to introduce the characters, but to me it is SO tedious to read sections of a book that don't take the story anywhere. USE that literary real estate, writers!

My first clue that I wasn't going to get into this book, I guess, should have been the list of characters that came up when I opened the first page on my Kindle. Ugh. If you have to have a list of characters and their relationships to each other, there are probably too many characters vying for major attention. I've read books where there are a lot of characters who are introduced organically in the story, and I've been able to keep them straight. This reminded me of The Warriors set of books about feral cats that my daughter read when she was younger, that always started with a detailed list of the cat clans and who was in them. (I never read one of those, either - started, but just couldn't do it!)

Finally, there are so MANY stinking sentence fragments in this book! Call me a grammar bitch if you want, but broken grammar rules are just off-putting to me. I keep telling myself that maybe this is a stylistic thing that is meant to give us a feel for Check's mind. I can see that. But it's not just Check who has sentence fragments - the bad grammar is woven through all the chapters I read. Just drives me batty.

I debated a bit whether to keep going. A storyline might emerge eventually, and I really do think the set-up for the story sounds interesting. But this is a book with like 400 pages. I do not want to get bogged down reading something I might not enjoy just to say I finished it. So.....onward!