 |
Bucking the Sun
By Ivan Doig
[Buy this book]
Review by Ellen Isaacs
| Rating: -1 |
| -4 |
-3 |
-2 |
-1 |
0 |
+1 |
+2 |
+3 |
+4 |
|
This book is the story of the Duff family and its experiences building the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, a public works project in the 1930s. The Duffs are a family of three grown brothers, their parents, their Scottish uncle, and the women who marry into the Duff family over the course of the book. Everyone in the extended family works in some role at the Dam, one as an engineer and the rest as laborers. Doig interweaves details about the mechanics of building of a dam into the story. The book starts with a murder that gets solved at the end of the book, but that turns out to be incidental to the story.
I had a lot of trouble getting through this book, even though I usually find books with complex family relationships interesting, and even though I was somewhat interested in how a dam gets built. I'm not sure what it was missing, but I found that I never really got an understanding of the characters and what motivated them. I was completely uninterested in the resolution of the murder, and upon finding out who had done it, I found it under-motivated through the book. The book focused on the men in the family, and never really developed the women characters, which was especially disappointing for me. Maybe men who like things to be unspoken will like this book better than I did.
|
