Virginia Reeves

This is a work of historical fiction, set in the south in the mid 1920s Before the story has begun we are already aware there will be a death on this land and that Roscoe Martin will be jailed for it. The story flashes back and forth between the time leading up to that death and jail sentence, to the time Roscoe is currently serving out his sentence and then continues past his eventual release. He and his wife Marie were not exactly the happiest married couple you will ever encounter though they did both try to make things work in their own way up until his jail time when Marie totally abandoned him. Roscoe had never actually wanted to be a farmer and his resentment of that was often felt by his wife and son. This was a tragic story of the breakdown of not only a marriage but ultimately a family.
I enjoyed the story but I could have done without the excessive descriptions of wires, coils transformers and how electricity works.

I received an advance copy for review… (mehr)

The core of this novel is Roscoe's time in prison and how he handles it - the inner struggle with guilt and loss as well a the outward struggle with the prison regime and its characters. We're also given some insight into Martin's life before prison interwoven with his prison life, but not that much and mainly as a supporting narrative cum commentary. We also have a short but emotionally powerful redemption story folllowing his release but we know too little of the main characters involved, Martin apart, for it to be truly insightful. Reeves tells her tale well but ultimately it doesn't quite deliver. March 2020… (mehr)

I'm becoming a great admirer of Virginia Reeves' work. This book confirms the positive impression I got from reading "Work Like Any Other". That work dwelt quite a bit on father-son relationships whereas this is definitely about love and marriage. It's based on a real person, apparently, but I felt that there was a universality about the story that appealed to me. Given that I can't really speak for the whole human race, I suppose what I'm really saying is that I saw myself and my own relationships in this story. The complexity of relationships is well presented by Reeves - the marriage relationship clearly has problems, but is it bad enough to break up? And how might the decline of a relationship lead to the people responding in unhelpful ways . . . perhaps to provoke a complete breakdown? How do people really relate to each other when they separate after a long period together? All of the people in this story were entirely believable to me, and more than that, all of them were fully three-dimensional and none either angelically good or hatefully bad. Reeves has clearly earned a place on my Favorite Authors list… (mehr)