Rating: 
Summary: Could have gotten the story out in half the pages
Review: There were much to many useless paragraphs in the book to keep me interested. While the storyline was good, the story could have been told in half the pages in the book. I even gave it to a friend to read and she quit after 40 pages. Very disappointed!
Rating: 
Summary: Peggy
Review: This book was simply awesome. It took me quite a while to read it because it was so lovingly written and so absolutely moving. I cannot even imagine how Mr. Lent could conjure such a heartfelt and sad story that gave me shivers more than once.I would highly recommend this book. It is absolutely stunning.
Rating:
Summary: Not skin but slavery
Review: Suppose Scarlett Ohara was a runaway slave, whose beautiful mother had been raped by the man who owned them, who saved a wounded boy from Vermont and then walked there together as his wife. Almost home a neighbor woman hanging clothes to dry in the sun sees the boy and the Negress and the young man hears "the soft spatter of clothespins falling in the grass behind him." Leah became kin - not without hurt and always knowing she must set right what she ran from. That takes her life, but troubled, sadly beautiful daughters unknowingly follow the path to - let's call it "redemption" A very twisted path it may seem, but put me in mind of a Moebius strip - gets you on the other side and then back to the beginning. No maps required. A good writer develops a "voice." This story is in dialect, which evolves imperceptibly from Carolina to the Canadian border, from the era of Lincon to that of Coolidge. A good story should resolve something; all I'll tell you is that meanness and savagery are finally exorcised by a creature that isn't even human. (OK, a puppy dog.) This level of art requires a message, especially because there is trouble about race. And the message is that Americ's race problem is not skin color but slavery. A flaw? Jeffrey Lent admires and honors womenkind - unreservedly. If we have a sex problem in our country it is not about anatomy but respect. I'm with Jeffrey on that!
Rating:
Summary: How can anyone rate this less than a five?
Review: I'm amazed that anyone can rate this novel less than five stars. If you ask me, a couple of more novels like this from Lent, and he'll be up there with likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Seriously, this is one of the best American novelists to debut in the last 70 years!
Rating: 
Summary: in the fall
Review: Although a first novel, which shows promise, Lent is too wordy and self-important which manifests itself in the prose. The book is depressing. The minute you turn to page two, you know that nothing good is going to happen to the characters. Lent copies too much from recent best-sellers, i.e., Cold Mountain, Beloved and Color Purple. If he would choose his own subject, perhaps his prose would flow better.
Rating:
Summary: So-o Disappointed!
Review: Someone PLEASE tell me it's worth my time to continue reading this book. I've only read the first 50 pages and have little interest in continuing. I had great expectations after reading several reviews but cannot get into it at all. I think Mr. Lent's writing is beautiful but awkward and difficult to read. I really want to like it but it feels like a story whose characters and events I've read about quite frequently before. Say it ain't so someone...tell me it's worth finishing.
Rating:
Summary: I wanted to like this book,
Review: maybe because it brought back fond memories of "Cold Mountain". But I found it flat,boring. I didn't even bother finishing it.
Rating: 
Summary: I haven't been able to stop thinking about it
Review: Maybe it's because I am unfamiliar with the works it's being compared to, but I thought this was a fine novel. All the criticism about sentence structure is valid, but the mystery surrounding the devastation that followed Leah's return to Sweetboro kept me racing through the book, while concern for the fate of the members of the family swept me up emotionally. The story was powerful and engrossing enough to compensate for any technical flaws.
Rating:
Summary: Skeptical at first, then sold.
Review: I'm generally skeptical of most modern writers -- there's a tendency to project the modern propensity for endless self-examination on a book's characters, a practice that may be believable (but not enjoyable) in a story set in current times, but is less so in historical fiction -- and was skeptical about this one, too, for that reason. I was pleasantly surprised. Jeffrey Lent's writing style is quite elegant and the story he tells most compelling. There's no predicting the turns the story takes, and the progress of life from the late 1860s through to the 1920s is seamlessly depicted, but never laboriously described. It's just lovely the way Mr. Lent carries the reader through these lives as though one is participating in them, and not simply observing them. With one exception, every person in the story abstains entirely from self-psychoanalysis, no one weeps over his or her fates and fortunes and, instead, everyone is swept along in life by the frailties of his or her own character. (Which is, generally speaking, the way life goes.) I enjoyed the characters -- they had complexity and depth -- and liked very much the fact that the story leaves gaps for the reader to fill in with her own imagination. Really quite a wonderful book for any writer; extraordinary for a first effort. I look forward to Mr. Lent's next effort.
Rating:
Summary: Find your own voice
Review: Faulkner begat McCarthy who begat Frazier who begat Lent. I really wanted to like this novel. It's very honest, and Lent tried very hard, but it irks me that such a talented writer feels compelled to imitate other imitators. There was only one Dixie Express; Cormac and Frazier are phonies -- Jeff, I look forward to the day when, like Faulkner, you write what you want to write in the way you want to write it and not worry about how you think a Great or Important American novel should be written. Read a little Ellroy, is my advice. And watch out for sentences that make no sense -- you have a lot of them, and I guess the editor left them in because they sound good in a portentous sort of way. Read William of Ockham, too.
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