Rating: 
Summary: (3.5) An unbroken thread
Review: For me, the character of Leah created the most memorable image and initiated most of my curiosity. A runaway slave who marries a Union soldier from Vermont, Leah puts enough distance between her slave life and her new role as wife and mother to afford her a margin of safety. It is her fate to learn that no matter how far we run, the past follows like a shadow.No matter what events happen in the lives of the Pelhams in the three generations adressed in the novel, Leah is the sole character who permeates the lives of all. Her experiences in Vermont may be mere echoes of her former life, but but the dark shadows of prejudice still lurk everywhere. Mystery surrounds what happened to Leah Pelham when, after 25 years, she returned to North Carolina to confront her past and search for her mother. The answers profoundly affect the rest of her life and her family. Leah and Norman Pelham have two daughters and one son; the girls remain close to home, but the son, Jaimie, leaves without a word to forge his own path, seemingly adrift from the past. In the final chapters, it is Jaimie's son, Foster, 16, who unravels the mystery. He is the vehicle through which we finally learn the entire story as he returns to Vermont and meets his two aging aunts, the family tree as unique and fascinating as he could ever imagine. The details of Foster's grandmother's quest for closure are significant for the remaining cast of characters, but even without this revelation, the damage to generations is clear. The institution of slavery tainted everyone, North and South, and continues to do so today in it's often more subtle forms. The message is clear: evil engenders evil and plunges roots deep into society that eventually choke the soul of a Nation. The author's prose is often long and wordy and perhaps could have benefited from some editorial restraint. But aside from being a novel with a compelling storyline, IN THE FALL is valuable, as well, as an object lesson in the moral devastation that accompanies slavery in any form. If for no other reason, the book is an important testament to the truth of that reality.
Rating: 
Summary: It deserves more than 5 stars!
Review: I was assigned this book for an AP Lit class. It was one of the best books we read all year. This book captures the Vermont that can still be found if you travel off the paved roads and into the backwater areas where dirt roads are still more numerous than their black-top cousins - right down to the dialect used: the word "liddle" immediately comes to mind. This book has everything - a plot line that is interesting, with twists and turns, yet is still not confusing; deep characters whose actions work on more than one level; and a good ending. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: #1 on my list. Period.
Review: And you thought writing that takes your breath away was a pleasure of the past? Fear not. Jeffrey Lent uses the English language in ways so few people can. I've been a librarian for 20 years and no book has ever hit me like this one. Allow yourself 15 pages a night because you'll be so sorry when you reach the final sentence.
Rating:
Summary: Home?
Review: Jeffrey Lent heard (or read . . . he doesn't remember which) about a Civil War soldier who met up with a former slave woman, married her, and brought her back with him to his family's northern town. That snippet of Civil War era lore is the core of this amazing, large novel. In The Fall is Lent's first novel. It is more than 500 pages long. It takes a penetrating, powerful, and lasting look at the complexity of race in America, and equally importantly, it reveals the complexity of marriage: of bringing two individuals (in this case, with vastly different pasts) together in the hope that they can create one unified future. In as much as the future is made up of the past, however, hope will not carry the day here. In The Fall tells the story of three generations of Pelhams, but it really centers around Leah, the matriarch former slave who cannot escape her time and place. She discovers Norman, her future husband, lying face down on a Civil War battlefield with his ear half torn off, and she first nurses him back to health and then heads north with him, attempting to escape her present and her past. She is the catalyst for this novel, and her past -- which we don't fully learn about until the novel's end (and which she never discovers accurately) -- is the one thing no generation of Pelhams will escape or undue. A former slave can fall in love with a white, northern Union solider, marry him, raise a family, create a life for herself and her children, and even find some measure of comfort, contentment, and happiness; but she cannot leave behind her ghosts or her family. This book is broken into three sections. In the first, Norman and Leah struggle to fit into their closed Vermont society. They are largely isolated, but have a family and develop a satisfying life together until Leah feels compelled to confront her past. Norman practically begs her, in his stoic New England way, to let sleeping dogs lie, but she cannot. What she learns in her return to North Carolina rehsapes fundamentally all that they have created together since the War. In the second section, their youngest child, Jamie, leaves the farm and the stigma he has faced his entire life as the child of a black mother and a white father, and more. When he leaves, Jamie never looks back, and never tells his own child of his past, hoping that the tie has been severed once nad for all. Only in the third section does the past reassert itself when Jamie's young son, Foster, returns to the Vermont farm. There he finds his extended family different than expected, sees the price they paid for their place in the vermont, and eventually travels all the way back to North Carolina to unravel again the mystery that surrounds his grandmother's life. All three parts of this book are compelling and well-written; all of the characters will impress themselves on your mind; but make no mistake, the story of Norman and Leah stands as the core of the novel, not to be outshone by anything that comes later. These two will inhabit your mind and imagination throughout the rest of the book, just as they imhabit the minds and imaginations of their offspring. In The Fall moves slowly and covers a lot of ground. It deals with race, with the concept of family, and with the impact that two people have on each other through marriage. The duality at the core of this book is hard to accept: do what you can to move forward, always with the knowledge that your past is both rpesent and future. In In The Fall the past ruthlessly stalks the characters and marks all of their days present and future. If that sounds like fate, know that this book has a biblical quality to it. The language is lush, the subject matter rich, the time frame long, and the events portentious. This is not light reading, but it is often beautiful and always resonant.
Rating:
Summary: Loved it.
Review: Really enjoyed this novel. I had seen and heard of it for a while, but was slow to getting around to reading it. Now I'm not sure what kept me away. Lent uses language wonderfully. He has his stylistic idiosyncracies, but isn't that what literature is about - reading unique voices and glimpsing unthought of aspects of the human experience. He approaches the damaging effects of slavery in an interesting way - by tracing the emotional legacy left on a family poised between white and black. Good stuff. Important and thought provoking.
Rating:
Summary: Faulkner Country, Transposed
Review: It's as though Bill Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike had entered a dark fusion machine and emerged as Jeffrey Lent. I say this not because Lent is one of those McCarthy clones who are suddenly populating the literary landscape, or that his writing is precisely reminiscent of anyone, but: the narrative materials are lifted straight out of Yoknapatawpha County, the lovely, lapidary prose sometimes recalls Updike, and the incisive, oblique observation and beautifully wrought violence contains whispers of McCarthy. This, however, is clearly Faulkner country, transposed to New England: broad, dynastic, operatic, with tangled, busted lives, "sins of the fathers," thwarted redemption, miscegenation, deeply hatched plotting, and long stretches of psychological discovery. Lent transforms these raw materials into a work of unique beauty: his characters are vivid and memorable. His plotting and pacing strike me as signs of architectonic genius. And his descriptive powers, directed to familiar objects--dew on a leaf, a sunset, a snowy vista--unscroll utterly unspoiled language in sinuous, carefully wrought sentences, making us "see" with his own keen eye for fresh metaphor, the kind of virtuoso writing that stops us dead--"HOW could he have done that????"--in much the same way as passage after passage of Mozart have overpowered generations of admirers. Stay with this book: The languid beginnings of In the Fall reproduce the numbing routine of Norman Pelham's rural life--not since Cather's My Antonia have I so deeply perceived the sheer, isolated brutality of a 19th century winter--but, in the following section, with the arrival of Norman's son in the dangerous city, the book's pulse picks up, indeed hurtles, forward, and forward, to a harrowing finale. Here is essential American literature, and a name to remember: Jeffrey Lent, Faulkner of the Northlands.
Rating: 
Summary: audio version - good listening
Review: The characters were full and the rendering of accents exceptioinal. The story line was easier to follow than most audio books, and did not ramble ecessively to loose the listener who may have a need to turn on and off.
Rating:
Summary: In the Fall
Review: This book tells a familiar story, but the people involved, the settings, the emotional states, are so well drawn. Excellent writing ! The way people love in the story is powerful and heart wrenching. The language is enthralling. Up until the last tenth of this book I thought:"I'm going to buy 10 copies of this book for Christmas presents." I loved the dogs.The middle "filler " other reviewers have referred to, was my favorite part ! Then I got to the end and became so angry with Jeffrey Lent. Foster was such a wonderful person when visiting his Vermont relatives. When he got to Pelham, I cringed at his immaturity. Mr Lent has him do stupid-but-every-kid-does-it- kind of stuff, but also predictable and unlikely things, like sleep in the cabin behind the house.Drive off into the sunset with HER? HUH? The ending was from who knows where. Otherwise it was an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: A Great American Novel
Review: This is a great American novel, Faulknerian in scope and language. It follows three generations of an interracial family from the battlegrounds of the Civil War to the pre-Depression South, a family in whose history is embedded a dark and inscrutable secret. Absorbing, compelling and, ultimately, deeply moving, it admonishes us against delving too deeply into our past while recognizing we are impelled to do so. A page-turner as a story, the regional inflections in its language fix it in time and place. The best novel since Cold Mountain. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: a little long at times
Review: I just finished reading In The Fall and am really glad I did. I found it difficult to get into at first and difficult to put down later. There were definately descriptive paragraphs that I skimmed. In my opionion there were times when those descriptions went long. That may just be my preference for reading about people though. I read many books about interracial families and biracial children and felt like this subject was handled well. It's a different time period than I'm used to. My only complaint was that the 2 sisters remained "tragic mulattos". Although they found a comfortable life for themselves they were unable to find love. That was way too cliche for the rest of the book. Definately worth reading.
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