Book Review: Book Review Lacuna
by: by Barbara Kingsolver
Rating: ★★★ (3/5)
Opening Hook
This book frustrated me a bit and surprised me, especially since the author is one of my favorites. It was so aggravating that I wrote a pre-review, which you can read here:
The book could almost need three separate reviews: a slow and confusing start, a strong middle, and a fantastic ending.
Book Overview
The story takes place in Mexico and the U.S., beginning in 1916. It is historical fiction, something I enjoy reading. It blends the young life of a person who leaves the U.S. with his Mexican mother for her homeland of Mexico after her divorce from her American husband.
The child lives a very disjointed life. His mother is a bit flighty, has little money, and pays little attention to her son while spending her time chasing men in search of a better life. At one point, she sends her son back to the U.S. to live with his dad, who doesn’t spend much time with him and puts him in a boarding school for a year before he eventually returns to Mexico.
As the story unfolds, we follow his young and somewhat unusual life. He eventually works as a cook for Leon Trotsky, who is being protected in Mexico from Stalin. Trotsky and his wife become part of his life, along with the famous Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
After Trotsky is assassinated, he makes his way back to the U.S. with the help of Frida Kahlo. She gets him out of Mexico while the investigation is ongoing by having him travel as a courier transporting her artwork to the U.S. for a show.
He spends the rest of his life in the U.S., becomes a famous writer, and eventually gets wrapped up in the Red Scare of the 1940s and is blacklisted.
What Worked
This was a good historical fiction novel and tied together real and fabricated places and people. It did a great job with the historical pieces, particularly the Red Scare and communism in the U.S. after World War II.
The story was good, but it always felt a bit fragmented. You wanted more about these time periods, but that is the point of the title, The Lacuna, which means gaps.
The author did a nice job of working in how the government and media will run with stories and fill in unanswered questions with fake or incomplete information to generate buzz and attention. I think this was her way of making a statement about the world we live in today. What she describes isn’t new, just more advanced.
Strong Ideas
The idea for the book was interesting, building a story around actual historical events while fabricating some fictional characters, particularly the protagonist, and showing how historical times can impact a person without using an actual historical person to tell that story.
It was also presented in a way I had never seen before. The story was written and told through the protagonist’s journals, which he kept throughout his life. Those journals also helped create the gaps in the story, which ties back to the title, The Lacuna.
Strong Characters
The strong characters are really the protagonist, Harrison, Frida, his friend in Mexico, and the painter who helped him, and Violet Brown, his secretary when he settled in the U.S. Violet handled much of his life and helped manage things for him. She also became an important part of preserving and telling his story.
The other characters played good supporting roles, but these three really held the story together.
Strong Writing
Barbara Kingsolver is always a strong writer and always builds a good story. She takes you on a journey that is never quite straightforward and always gives you some surprises. She takes you to a time and place you would like to visit and leaves you wanting more.
This is my seventh novel of hers that I have read. It is not my favorite, and the start puzzled me, but the end was fabulous. That is why I mentioned in my opening that this could almost be three reviews: a slow and confusing start, a strong middle, and a fantastic ending.
What Didn’t Work
If you read my pre-review post, and the link is above, the start really frustrated me. The end tied everything together and explained why it was done that way. However, it took 600 pages to understand that.
That being said, I was not a fan of the presentation. Writing a book that reads like a person’s journal was not something I expected from the author. As I noted at about the 100-page mark, the short, almost childlike entries eventually got better and longer, with more detail. I did find this approach odd and it was not something I expected from Kingsolver.
Modern Relevance
This did show that even in today’s world, we take stories and shape them depending on the audience. There are conservative and liberal news slants to stories, and whether something is false or even true, the stories can be skewed in a way to generate what we now call clicks or likes.
What we think is new has really been around for some time. It started many decades ago and is now using that same formula with an even greater and more diverse way of presenting information, sometimes to sway the public along political lines.
Final Verdict
I would give this 3 to 3.5 stars. I liked the story and loved the ending. I was not crazy about the journal style and would have preferred the story to be presented as straightforward narration rather than through the actual journal entries.
I also did not like the fabricated book reviews based on the protagonist’s writing after he returned to the U.S. I just did not care for that and found it a bit distracting. Those reviews could have worked better for me if they had simply been woven into the story, since that was already part of the story.
Barbara Kingsolver has several books I would read again, but this was not one of them.
Rating: ★★★
Leave a Reply