How the Body Prays

Rating:
Summary: UNDERDEVELOPED CHARACTERS AND SHALLOW STORYLINE
Review: Reading this series of "portraits", as the book jacket calls these short vignettes, one gets the feeling that each story gets only barely beneath the surface of the characters involved...like a flat rock skimming over the surface of a lake in summer. And even when the stone sinks quickly beneath the surface, it only sinks mere inches into the shallow water. Too shallow to even be called a lake. A puddle, really. Peter Weltner sets out to tell the interrelated stories of the Odom family...a family torn apart by war, both inside and outside of its familial structure. Through the eyes of each individual character, we find out a little something about this war torn family...very little. We feel that there is so much more to learn than what we're being told, but somehow aren't quite privileged to that information. In the narrative voices of both male and female family members, it's the men we find telling the most compelling and memorable stories...and the most believable. The women's voices don't ring true, sounding forced and flat, while the men's are rich and vibrant with emotion. Even with such an undertaking though, we feel cheated and unsatisfied with the results. For an author to take on such an ambitious narrative device, he would need to delve deeply into the hearts of each person and flesh them out more vividly on the page...much more so than is done here. I walked away from this book with a feeling that I needed about ten more pages for each character to get a strong sense of who they are, or who they were trying to be, which is unfortunate.

Rating:
Summary: UNDERDEVELOPED CHARACTERS AND SHALLOW STORYLINE
Review: Reading this series of "portraits", as the book jacket calls these short vignettes, one gets the feeling that each story gets only barely beneath the surface of the characters involved...like a flat rock skimming over the surface of a lake in summer. And even when the stone sinks quickly beneath the surface, it only sinks mere inches into the shallow water. Too shallow to even be called a lake. A puddle, really. Peter Weltner sets out to tell the interrelated stories of the Odom family...a family torn apart by war, both inside and outside of its familial structure. Through the eyes of each individual character, we find out a little something about this war torn family...very little. We feel that there is so much more to learn than what we're being told, but somehow aren't quite privileged to that information. In the narrative voices of both male and female family members, it's the men we find telling the most compelling and memorable stories...and the most believable. The women's voices don't ring true, sounding forced and flat, while the men's are rich and vibrant with emotion. Even with such an undertaking though, we feel cheated and unsatisfied with the results. For an author to take on such an ambitious narrative device, he would need to delve deeply into the hearts of each person and flesh them out more vividly on the page...much more so than is done here. I walked away from this book with a feeling that I needed about ten more pages for each character to get a strong sense of who they are, or who they were trying to be, which is unfortunate.

Rating:
Summary: Meditation
Review: The previous reviewer sounds like maybe a disgruntled student who did not do so well in Mr. Weltner's class. The book itself seems to hark back to works by Hemingway and Faulkner. Mr. Weltner has an astute knowledge of literature and his influences appear readily in this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Meditation
Review: The previous reviewer sounds like maybe a disgruntled student who did not do so well in Mr. Weltner's class. The book itself seems to hark back to works by Hemingway and Faulkner. Mr. Weltner has an astute knowledge of literature and his influences appear readily in this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this book, it's bad.
Review: This book is the most over-written, pretentious, without a doubt just plain rotten collection of typing (not writing) that I have ever had the misfortune to read. Mr. Weltner, I'd tell you to keep your day job, but since I found out you teach English Lit I'd have to advise you to just give up. For shame!

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this book, it's bad.
Review: This book is the most over-written, pretentious, without a doubt just plain rotten collection of typing (not writing) that I have ever had the misfortune to read. Mr. Weltner, I'd tell you to keep your day job, but since I found out you teach English Lit I'd have to advise you to just give up. For shame!