Tim Westover (4 stars) -- expected publication date: July 2012
(taken from Goodreads): "Water spirits, moon maidens, haunted pianos, headless revenants, and an invincible terrapin that lives under the mountains. None of these distract James Holtzclaw from his employer’s mission: to turn the fading gold-rush town of Auraria, GA, into a first-class resort and drown its fortunes below a man-made lake. But when Auraria’s peculiar people and problematic ghosts collide with his own rival ambitions, Holtzclaw must decide what he will save and what will be washed away.
Taking its inspiration from a real Georgia ghost town, Auraria is steeped in the folklore of the Southern Appalachians, where the tensions of natural, supernatural and artificial are still alive."
MY THOUGHTS: It's always something of a risk, requesting ARCs from Netgalley, particularly books by authors whom you've never heard of. But the blurb contained enough interesting details to pique my interest -- this sounded like a great cross between John Crowley's Little, Big and Charles de Lint's Appalachian stories, like A Circle of Cats.
Westover proves himself right off as a talented writer with surehanded prose, deft descriptions, and an ear for strong dialogue. I was easily caught up in the setting and time period; there are enough details to provide a sense of location and time period, but also just a tinge of vagueness so that the story takes on an almost otherworldly sense as well at times -- as though the characters have been pulled out of their actual time and location and dropped into another world. That's a hard trick to manage, but Westover does it well.
In fact, he does it almost too well from the start. While all the characters are interesting, it's Holtzclaw whom we are partnered with from the beginning, and I wasn't sure I bought into his total acceptance of the folklore of Auraria. At first, it's obviously because his character is so blindly set on obtaining the land his employer demands, but at some point his eyes are opened more clearly, and he just accepts things so naturally. I'm not sure if readers are supposed to just accept that he had acclimated to the place so quickly that he could do nothing but accept what was going on around him. His character seemed so uptight in the beginning that I really expected more of a freakout from him, but that never happened.
The various characters are amusing, interesting, and varied; the plot moves along quickly, with just a few lapses in a couple of spots. There were one or two chapters that seemed out of place -- almost like small, stand-alone chunks of folklore or old stories tucked into the larger story being told. There were wonderfully written, like everything else here, but they disrupted the flow of the story for me, and it took a bit to get back into the rhythm of things.
Westover has written an enjoyable novel, with just the right combination of historical fiction and Georgian folklore to keep readers of a variety of genres interested. This is one that I'm glad I took a chance on at Netgalley, and I'll be recommending it to readers upon release.
Note: I received an Advanced Review Copy in e-book format from Netgalley.
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