'The Village' is set in a region close to my heart. While Rhoden proves his fascination and familiarity with the south east Asian landscape and people, his writing is unnecessarily verbose. A good editor could have tightened up the prose and kept the narrative focussed.
Rhoden's vocabulary is broad and deep, but an overuse of adverb and latinates teeters on the indigestible at times.
Life in a village anywhere in the world is made up of small moments and an intricate mesh of relationships and noticings. "The Village" brings the people in this particular place to life for a world wide readership. ( )

“The Village” is a significant work of art and is deserving of examination by acclaimed (or at least competent) critics. Author, T. F. Rhoden uses language with as much artistic power as ever any of the masters used a palette. The novel captures life in Southeast Asia as clearly as did America’s local color authors -- as poignantly as Robert Frost captured life in New England; as realistically as Willa Cather captured the mid-west. Rhoden has a keen, perceptive eye for rural life and culture, and has the capacity to people it with real, breathing characters: Mae Aeo, widowed mother of son, Beck, and daughter, Naem, guardian of Jin, six-year-old orphaned by Aeo’s brother, Gop and Aeo’s sister-in-law; Somgiat Pucksahsawan , Aeo’s late husband; Kin, deputy to the village’s “Great -Man,” Dom, the great man himself; and tempestuous Mai, who lost out to Aeo for Somgiat’s affection.

Rhoden is particularly adept at depicting the behaviors of the women and girls in the village. When on a visit to town, Jin and a few of Jin’s young friends follow “Mae and Naem away from the pickup truck, stopping only when Naem stopped to unconsciously check herself in the car’s side mirror, each of the girls imitating Naem’s example by peering at the reflections their circular faces made, one side of their face at a time, one girl after another.”

Then: “The band of female villagers beheld the township’s super mart, slowing their tread in deference to its naked modernity, like a line of felines, perched along a narrow fence, suddenly startled, awoken to an overbearing presence.”

In preparing for her morning bath, Naem wraps herself in a towel, “looking something now like a baloney blanketed hors d’oeuvre.” She disrobes in such a way that: “All her movements graceful, all her movements well rehearsed, strategic even, this routine could never have been in danger of indecency. All four pale walls of her bedroom could have been made out of glass, with an army of peeping-toms encircled looking in, and not a soul would have been able to observe any more naked flesh than her feet, hands and silent face.”

Here Aeo speaks of her brother whose wild drunken carelessness resulted in orphaning Jin: “Gop was like the slime, the sludge, the mottled muck, that never seems to wash itself clean from a laundered piece of clothing.”

I find myself wanting to lift passage after passage out of the book - but better if the book is read, not these slim passages. Do not look to “The Village” as a page-turner, a romantic drama, or a thriller - it is none of these, but it is clearly structured, beautifully written, rewarding, uplifting, and well worth reading.

I did not like this book and would not recommend it to anyone I know. There was nothing really appealing about the story or the location. I liked the characters, but I was not drawn into the story well enough to care what the character did other than be cute. This book was a sad disappointment!

I received this book from Library Thing Member Giveaways and I promised to post a review both on LibraryThing and on Amazon. Without that promise and without the wonderful language the book is written in I would not have finished this book at all. ( )

Come and meet Naem and Jin, living in this corner of Asia in a village, where life flows with its ups and downs and everything happens and nothing really changes, like in the lazy summers of our youths, when we used to spend ur holidays at the farm with grandma or auntie and their neighbours and firends.
I loved the sound of the words, each tale like a song, fascinating, albeit not reccomended for those who look for action and exciting plots.
"A florescent light flickered faintly in one corner of the office with a tempo and rhythm that lacked both rhyme and reason. Though its inviting flash caught the attention of both men periodically, it was not powerful enough to induce them closer, not annoying enough to make them change out the bulb. The blinking florecence was, if anything, a reminder of the gentle sinecure they were enjoying ( )

While reading this book, I felt that the bones of a novel were in place. The pacing and character development unfolded at a reasonable speed and while this is far from being a high-action novel, there was enough storyline to keep the plot moving forward and enough to keep me interested in continuing.

However, while the basic structure was in place, I feel that this novel needed a great deal of polishing to improve some other aspects. The two that stuck out for me were the sheer wordiness of many of the passages and the narrator's frequent interruptions to expound upon a variety of generalizations.

(1) Wordiness: The novel strives to detail the simplicity of life in rural South-East Asia but this is in juxtaposition to how verbose the novel is. Every page is dotted with four, five, six line sentences which just obscure the goal of simplicity. An enormous amount of words need to go so that we have a simple style mimicking a simple story, rather than a heavy style becoming too much of a distraction.

(2) Narrative interruptions: These occur frequently throughout the novel. Just flipping through, I found one on page 155 (Like all naturally kind men...) and one on page 255 (Whether anyone in any age...). These constant intrusions are clearly not the the thoughts of any of the characters in the novel. As such, they are completely unnecessary. I don't want to read a story where a narrator tells me his/her personal opinion on a scene; I can draw my own conclusions. These interruptions distract from the main story line and illuminate the story not at all.

I would definitely say that this novel has potential, but I think that it could be trimmed to half its size by eliminating the excess verbiage and narrative interruptions, leaving a much tighter, more focused piece of work. ( )