This novel is told using multiple threads and tells the story about the lasting effects of the Civil War and spans over 100 years. I'm afraid I wasn't a fan of the writing style and didn't make it all the way through as it just didn't work for me. Thank you for the advance copy.

This book is very much in the spirit of highflown literary fiction and not really for me. I struggled to get into this book, but can see that it would appeal to lovers of Colson Whitehead et al.

I’m not usually a fan of war novels but I liked the cover, the title and the blurb intrigued me so I thought I’d give it a shot. Unfortunately, this one fell a little flat for me. There are some good moments in the book. The main issue with the book is the language used. The prose is very dense and off-putting at times. I’m a smart woman but struggled to untangle the language at times:

He saw where he had been before his birth. The darkness there, too. A void broken only by spirals of color. A vastness so great as to be meaningless.

She was taught a language beyond speech, one that existed when the ground on which all her torments occurred had been submerged below a channel sea, with a vocabulary that remained unchanged even with the unending forces of thrust and rift at work.

WTF? Speak English, dude. I’m sorry but the language is very wordy and pretentious at times. I had to force myself to wade through it at times.

There are also too many characters to keep track off. The language didn’t help me to relate or sympathise with any of them.

Sorry, this was not for me.

A story based around the American Civil War through to the 1980s. Difficult to follow at times with the frequent time shifts but an effort the hangovers from the slave culture which it succeeds in doing.

Thank you NetGalley for the access to this in exchange for my thoughts.
I’ve not read Powers’ first novel, and have no idea whether the sprawling style is his trademark but this left me baffled.
The write-up suggests we’ll gain insight into the character of George, a man who doesn’t know where he came from, and that we’ll journey through the South at a time of change. Having finished I honestly feel none the wiser about George and little extra was given to me.
The book itself is written well in terms of style. I found myself admiring passages of description. Unfortunately there were just so many characters and nobody that I connected with, which meant I finished feeling that I don’t really know what happened or why and won’t care much.

A Shout in the Ruins is set across several generations, jumping from the end of the Civil War to almost a century later, moving back and forth across the timelines. It creates a sense of inevitability and interconnected as you come to understand the links between Rawls and Nurse, plantation slaves, the plantation owner Levallois, and George, an elderly man in the 1980s making a final pilgrimage to his childhood home. It’s powerfully written and brutal, but also explores love, tenderness and hope.

This is an incredible novel which spans over 100 years of American history during and after the Civil War. Encompassing civil war and slavery the author manages to touch upon so many important and historically powerful themes.
The author has entwined a number of characters’ narratives together throughout this novel, creating a beautifully interwoven thread of a plot and novel.
Thus, this novel features a wide range of characters, whose relationships to each other only become fully clear towards the end of the novel. In this way, the full picture of the novel isn’t clear until the end which makes the eventual moment of complete clarity all the more satisfying.
Powers has a very neat writing style, his precise language and imagery conveys all the emotion and gritty realism you would expect from a novel about themes such as slavery.
The timeline of this novel is ever-shifting, this at first takes some getting used to, but once the reader is accustomed to it, it adds to the sense of intrigue that permeates this novel, and the eventual understanding that comes.
Overall I really enjoyed this novel, I gave it 4/5 stars, and I am intrigued to see what else Powers has written!

ell written book. Set in the past and now with an interlinked narrative this brings history to life. I didn’t know anything about this part of American history and I’m glad I read this because it’s intersting. Some parallels with today.

George Seldom is an old man who decides to take some time to revisit his personal history on a road trip. He travels through the Deep South and as he does so the reader is given some of the events that have led to a country on the brink of race equality. The plantation of Beauvais is owned by a cruel master Levallois who, even before the Civil War, has recognised that industry is the way forward, not agriculture. His neighbour goes to fight in the war and Levallois usurps his land, his daughter and his life. Rawls has been in love with Nurse but both are purchased by Levallois and are subject to his mind games. Reid goes off to war a proud Confederate but returns to find that he has lost everything. Minor characters fight for what they believe is right.

This is a complex and very moving book which looks at aspects of the Civil War and the changes in society from numerous perspectives. The characters are not easy to pin down - Emily seems powerless to stop her fate but does she fight back in the worst way. Even the minor characters, the gang leader, the apprentice and the boatman are given a sympathetic perspective and the descriptions of violence are visceral in the extreme. I hadn't read Powers' first novel but know it was well received, I can see why.

Powers' debut about the Iraq war "Yellow Birds" was an amazing novel that I read a few years ago, so I was keen to get my hands on his new book. Although the themes in this novel are similar, it feels a million miles away. His first was based on real experience and you can feel it. This novel, although obviously incredibly well researched, does not deliver the same emotional blow. I guess that is inevitable and perhaps we should stop trying to compare them!

Powers' language and story telling skills are on show here. This is an enjoyable, fast-paced novel with some wonderful characters (if perhaps just a few too many). Powers focuses on the lives of the characters in close detail, whilst still conveying the historical arc. It hopped around a little too much for my liking and if you don't read it in long sessions you may find yourself a little lost in amongst the multiple timelines, characters and narratives.

The American Civil War is a common setting for books recently, perhaps down to the current political situation in America, but this one is worth a read and still has something original to say.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy in return for an honest review.

I'm going to go ahead and DNF this one. I think maybe a few years ago I would've been deeply interested in this storyline, but I've read a lot more books since then, where the characters are easy to follow, and the story isn't broken up by loads of jumps between time periods. The writing style just isn't for me, and I think the edition I was sent had some glitches - I found it quite hard to actually read, which was a shame. I DNF'd at 35% (around 96 pages in) - I couldn't get into it, and didn't want to spend much more time trying to power through it when I knew I wasn't going to enjoy the experience.

Not for the fainthearted, or for ostriches

Like many, I had been overwhelmed, lacerated and lacerated, by the reading of Powers first book, The Yellow Birds, detailing the experience of the war in Iraq. Powers had experienced that conflict, as a machine gunner. That powerful book was far from being any kind of glorification of war. Powers, a wonderful writer, pulls no punches, does not gloss over the awfulness of conflict, or the kinds of glorified lies countries tell themselves to encourage young men to enlist

A Shout in the Ruins, his second book, explores no less important, destructive, shaming themes which should be faced. He looks at racism, and its foundations in the history of slavery in the States, and the long shadow that has cast, and still casts.

“Rawls could see up and down the old man’s arms. They were lined with mark after mark of whip and brine, a topography of the passage of time and pain one on top of the other, a map in miniature of ridgeline and ravine going up into his shirtsleeves in an uninterrupted pattern”

This is a complex story, taking place over more than 100 years of American history. The central character is George, a quiet, reflective black man. And on his story, traced from the 1860s, George, now in his 90s. moving towards death (so his ‘present’ is the 1950s) is keen to unearth a mystery about his own origins, as an abandoned child. Those origins lie in the stories of those who had cared for him before he was ‘abandoned’ and why, indeed, abandonment happened. A story of slaves before the outbreak of war. In his 1950s present, American is still a segregated society, a society, effectively practising apartheid, in the South. And the continuing story of casual, unthinking, as well as deliberate racism continues beyond George’s death, in the later story of a young woman he meets, right at the end of his life, and her future, which includes someone damaged by one of America’s later conflicts

“Whoever said a rifle on a wall was an opportunity for suspense must have been European. As if there would ever be a question of its getting fired or not in America. The gun goes off when the line gets crossed, and the line got crossed a long time ago, when we were naked and wandered the savannah and slept beneath the baobab trees. When is simply a matter of how long it takes to get it out of the holster, how long it takes the bullet to arrive. Perhaps days or weeks or months, perhaps one’s whole life, but these are questions of distance and trajectory, of time and physics, and not of possibility”

This is an extremely difficult book to read at times, but it is one which I felt I had to read. As in Yellow Birds, punches are not pulled. Powers does not labour or over describe the awful violence of racism, rather, sentences are casually dropped in, rather like unexpected land mines, leaving the reader shocked and reeling. The throwaway information about a slave who had run away, and, on recapture, his ‘master’ deliberately damaged his feet, so the young man could not ever run away again, but would only be able to shuffle and hobble – still work, but not run

This is a deeply, deeply, despair filled book. There are wonderfully drawn, complex character, some are of a repellent, vicious nature, many are normally flawed, going along almost unthinkingly with the evil which may the way a society is structured, others question the wrong, and there are those who are like beacons of what it might mean to strive to be ‘human-kind’ But the lives of those the reader cares about will inevitably also be lives that experience pain, loss, grief
Another major theme is the importance of home and community. The book opens with the destruction of property and community by those seeking to ‘develop prime sites’ and spools back to earlier acts of destruction and violence towards community and home, done by those whose only care is the acquisition of personal wealth and power. Powers makes sure we are aware he is not just writing about America’s past, but about all our presents.

I had some reservations. As I found, at times, with Yellow Birds, which changed points of view a lot - whose story was being followed, at any point – I wished he had been a little more linear. At times there are just too many characters to keep track of, and the narrative might have been pruned, shaped more, to allow trajectory of story to be clearer, the strength of his writing itself to shine out more. There was also a question I was left with, which was unanswered, part of the quest George himself was trying to get to the bottom of, but, then, as I continued to think about this book, long after I had finished reading it – life is also full of little pockets of mystery which never do completely get solved

I received this as a copy for review from the publishers, via NetGalley

It has taken some time for me to write a review, as I needed some time, and distance, to evaluate my rating. The length of time the book stayed with me has meant that the reservations during reading itself, retreated

This is a hard book to read in places. Some of the details are harrowing to read. It is an interesting read and has obviously been well researched.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This moving and harrowing book detailing the civil war and the cruelty of the slave era, was let down by the constant jumping between narratives. I found it confusing to read and feel a simpler structure would have brought the narratives to life. It was beautifully written. Recommended.

A Shout In The Ruins manages to span nearly a century in less than 300 pages of beautifully simple, engaging prose. It wasn't difficult to get through this in one sitting. 

Set in Virginia during the American Civil War and the following century - while this may seem ambitious in scale, the way that it's written feels really intimate and accessible. For me this is due to the fact, despite the political backdrop, it's ultimately a character-driven story, portraying the lives of a whole cast of characters and how, as the story unfolds, their lives are interconnected. Yet it's always comprehensive and never feels overwhelming, every character is necessary and had their own moment eventually.

I wasn't sure that I'd enjoy something set during this time period, having very little previous knowledge about The Civil War, but that really isn't necessary to enjoy this story and actually added humanity to the bits and pieces of historical knowledge that I do have about this time (as much as you'd expect someone from Scotland, born in 1990 to have anyway) 

One of the other strengths of A Shout In The Ruins is that the author has used non-linear narrative to perfection - I really love stories that are told this way, I think that it serves historical fiction really well in general, and this in particular is a beautiful example of how it can provide a sense of tragic inevitability and layers of understanding as you progress with the story. (Which, by the way, pretty much ripped my heart out.)

Highly recommended.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to review this title.

 
 ~Received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I am not associated with the author or publisher in any way. My opinion is completely unbiased and entirely my own~

Powers is a wonderful, moving and elegiac writer who dazzles with his creativity, ingenuity and gift for words. This is an excellent book which ranges from the Civil war to the modern era and I was entranced, moved and entertained in equal doses. Not quite as wonderful as Yellow Birds but lovely all the same.

It prioritised form over content to the detriment of the whole. too much jumpin between narratives and time epriods, with no real benefit to the reader in doing so. I wish he had just focussed on bringing the world alive for the reader. In the end, i got bored which is a crime for a writer of this ability

A moving story of despair and betrayal, love and hope, set amidst the swamps and ruins of war. Beautifully written with fascinating characters. Well worth reading

This is an insightful and upsetting description of the barbarism of southern whites before and during the civil war. It also deals with the relatives of some of the main characters decades later. The story jumps from one period to the other,sometimes confusingly. Well written,with solid historical background,it will appeal to those who want to know more about these times.

An epic and all encompassing read. It takes place over many many years from before the Civil war in 1865 leading up to 1980s. There’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of characters to keep track of. But this author is not afraid of a challenge.

It’s a novel of shadows - black, white and lots of shades of gray - there’s several voices all at one - speaking and trying to get their point across which is often hard to separate. But on another note, this technique does translate the confusion of war well.

The landscape, the violence, the rawness and the breathtaking passion of those who live there is amazing to read. The truth of slavery and inhumane behaviour , less so. But it’s like a sketch on a wall - too large to appreciate in its entirety and it would have been good to spend time with one character at a time for longer period.

The cruelty and hopeless of the Civil war comes through loud and clear but I I think a simpler timeline with less voices would have made even the whispers of the message a lot more powerful.