Snake Song

Rating:
Summary: Storytelling at its best!
Review: Snake Song is a mature work - a storytelling banquet filled with drama, mystery, humor, myths and the tension of disparate cultures. Duff intertwines history and circumstance in a clever, and frequently eye-popping, retelling of legends from the Alabama-Coushatta Nation of East Texas. The author's use of dialect is gifted and illuminating and his mastery of revealing time in its linear and spatial dimensions is provocative. Austin Bullock, the central character and voice of disquiet duality, is subtly realized as he seeks to find a comfortable skin in which to live. His history unfolds as he circles the road between his self-created world in Annette and the world of his ancestors in the Big Thicket. He is a post-modern hero: consumed with self-knowledge and constrained by ennui. He knows humor will dull his pain, but he cannot free himself of the demons that possess his divided spirit. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Storytelling at its best!
Review: Snake Song is a mature work - a storytelling banquet filled with drama, mystery, humor, myths and the tension of disparate cultures. Duff intertwines history and circumstance in a clever, and frequently eye-popping, retelling of legends from the Alabama-Coushatta Nation of East Texas. The author's use of dialect is gifted and illuminating and his mastery of revealing time in its linear and spatial dimensions is provocative. Austin Bullock, the central character and voice of disquiet duality, is subtly realized as he seeks to find a comfortable skin in which to live. His history unfolds as he circles the road between his self-created world in Annette and the world of his ancestors in the Big Thicket. He is a post-modern hero: consumed with self-knowledge and constrained by ennui. He knows humor will dull his pain, but he cannot free himself of the demons that possess his divided spirit. Highly recommended.