Rating: 
Summary: Haunting Characters from a Haunting Subject
Review: First off, this novel is not written in a lineal fashion. At times the author jumps decades, even a century into the future. It took me a while to warm to the style, but not only does it work, it is the way one person would tell the a story about another person: "He did this and this. Little did we know that he would become a ..." There are few authors who can portray characters as well as Mr. Jones. I would put him in Steinbeck's class. The reader gets to know all the characters in this book well. At first, I thought Mr. Jones was merely introducing the people who populate this book (and there is a significant population of characters). I then realized that this was what the book was all about - the lives of these people in Madison County Virginia. And what interesting lives they were. The central theme is slave-owning blacks. The slave-owners, white and black, are followed as are free blacks and free whites. At the center is the plantation and its denizens of a slave-owning black named Henry. He was bought out of slavery as a boy by his father who now disapproves of his son's holding slaves. When Henry dies, his widow tries unsuccessfully to hold the plantation together with what she perceives is the benevolence that would allow her to follow her husband to heaven. Heaven accepted benevolent slave-owners. One ned not free his slaves to get through the Pearly Gates. It should be noted that some of the descriptions of this book portray the central theme as this disintegration. However, it comes near at the end of the book and is almost an afterthought. The heart of this book is the tenuous intertwining of whites and blacks in the ante-bellum south. Rather than the usual handling of these tensions, this book adds the compelling component of blacks owning blacks. This addition of a fourth class of southern citizen after rich whites, poor whites and slaves enriches this book and makes it a five star read. The rich character portraits carry the story-line rather than vice versa. I strongly recommend this book. It was wonderfully written, the characters hauntingly unforgettable and the topic a little known one that is compelling.
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth the effort
Review: I wouldn't characterize this book as one I couldn't put down, but I am glad I read it. I find it hard enough to fathom one man owning another, much less the thought of a man freed from slavery turning around and, of his own free will, owning others. There is something oddly compelling about Jones' writing style that kept me turning the pages, but he employs some literary devices I find distracting. For example, in many places the reader is told about an event in a character's history, their present circumstances and how this affects their future all in the same paragraph. Personally, I liked these shifts in time, but I can see how other reviewers and readers might find this troubling. Occasionally I was forced to go back and reread sections in order to orient myself and this, of course, interrupted the flow of my reading. One thing I did find annoying in the beginning was the number of characters. Their lives were so intricately, interwoven I kept confusing them. I finally resorted to making a flow chart in order to keep them all straight. The details woven into the story are so convincing, I have now read several reviews applauding the amount of research Jones "must" have done. In interviews, however, the author has stated all of these "facts" came directly from his imagination. Overall, I thought this was a very interesting, thought provoking book. I would recommend reading it when you have time to savor the details and enough patience to untangle all of the threads. Definitely not a quick, beach read, but well worth the effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Pure fiction
Review: Jones has admitted that he did not do any research for this book. He must have researched slavery or at least learned a little about it at some point, but basically he's taking a very sad event in black history and completing fabricating a story. The places and people aren't real, even the "historians" he mentions are fabrications. As a novel, this is not a bad book but as a look at one element of the story of American slavery, this novel does nothing to contribute to our understanding. Fictionalizing slavery can be done well but if the author doesn't research the topic, the reader cannot see it as a book about slavery but as a novel about people who are dropped into a slavery setting. There's a huge difference and it's a shame that the difference isn't made clear in an author's note at the start of the novel.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, thoughtful, and utterly compelling
Review: Edward P. Jones tackles a difficult subject with depth and courage. Unlike other reviews listed here, I did not find his prose difficult, but enjoyed its richness and color, and found "The Known World" filled with flawed and genuine people of all races who grapple with slavery-America's "peculiar institution"-in a way that will surprise and compel readers. Mourners come to Manchester County, Virginia to bury Henry Townsend and comfort his widow Caldonia. Henry was only 31 years old, a successful landowner and the owner of 33 slaves. He was also black, and a former slave himself. His human property learned from the start that working for a black master was no different from working for a white-or an Indian, for that matter. But they hold out the tiniest shred of hope that Caldonia, who was born free, will free them. Henry's father Augustus bought his own freedom from his owner, Bill Robbins. He then worked to buy his wife, and then his son. But Henry always felt more affinity with Robbins than he did with his own family, shocking his parents when he buys his first slave. There are a number of black and Cherokee slave owners in the area who look on slaves with perhaps even more dispassionate eyes than do their white neighbors. "The legacy," Henry's mother-in-law calls his slaves when Caldonia briefly considers manumitting them. "Don't throw away the legacy." I have never found a book that looks at slavery like "The Known World" does. Throw your preconceived notions out the window and be prepared to be completely pulled into a world where, no matter the characters' race, nothing is black and white.
Rating:
Summary: Very Intriguing!
Review: I think this book is excellent. But you definitely have to take your time while reading it. I read other reviews and one in particular criticized the book for not being "factual"...But the book is "a novel" in essence it is "fiction" so while the characters may not have really existed or even the historians, he cited...the story is based on a true piece of American History. It is no different than any other fiction novel based on American history. So I don't see the point in that arguement. Anyway, I say "Good job, Mr. Jones!"
Rating:
Summary: Deserving of the Pulitzer
Review: It is a weighty subject. Still, Edward Jones tackles the issue of black-owned slaves in pre-Civil War Virginia in thoughtful, immensely readable prose. This book is a true page-turner.
Rating:
Summary: Bad choice for awards
Review: I found this book poorly written. It dragged on with too many characters that I lost track of and of who belonged to whom. Boring! I was very disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling and with a acute sense of language
Review: This is an excellent book which reminded me of another one I found even more exciting called "The Marrow of Tradition" by Charles Chesnut, who wrote it a hundred years ago. It's another story of black/white relationships in the South that ends in a race riot. Another fierce song of pain is "Uncle Tom's Children", by Richard Wright. It's a shame these great books are shelved under the ghetto name of African-American literature; they should be placed in the same category as Joyce, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevsky, just as their authors surely intended.
Rating: 
Summary: An Ordeal....But Worth It
Review: I decided to read The Known World because I was told it was written with a very informative look towards slavery and offered many ideas not often covered in depth. Unfortunately undertaking the reading of this book started for me with difficulty. I could not grasp the author's writing style and I almost gave up several times in dissapointment. But thankfully I read on and towards the last 100 pages finally got involved. With so many characters to keep track of it would have helped to take notes in the beginning, especially since the author jumps about from time, character and place so often. The author's writing style distracted me from involvement with his characters until the end of the book. But most importantly I learned something new. The Known World expanded my own. Not only did I learn about other sides of slavery, I also learned how to read outside the norm and found myself involved in a facinating read.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling and thought provoking
Review: Much has already been said about the basic plot of this book, so I'd like to address the non-linear writing style...imagine yourself as a leaf tumbling down a stream, sometimes hurtling forward, yet frequently caught in little swirling eddies along the edges. If you relax and "go with the flow" rather than expecting this book to read as you would wish, you will find it to be an astounding and seductive experience on several levels. The viewpoint of this book is equally fluid; through some magic, Jones has you seeing life through the eyes of whatever character he's currently focused upon. There are terrible, ugly, beautiful, sad, heartwarming things that happen constantly throughout this book and somehow, you are always identifying through the protagonist of the moment, whether this be a slave or a slave patroller, frightening as that might be. There is no melodrama here. Somehow, everything is just taken for granted, assumed...it is, after all, their known world. And, for a brief time, ours as well. We eventually come to take it for granted. We can look back with the smugness of time and condemn slavery and its consequential perverse social structurings. Yet a book like this makes one question our own "known world," the social structures and cultural practices we take for granted and assume we are powerless to change. I wonder what our descendents will find equally perverse here...probably our oil addiction which forces us to attempt to control countries half-way around the world rather than simply learning to make do with less here at home.
| 
