Search - The Known World

Just because a book has won a pulitzer prize and everyone around you says its a great book does not make it a good read. I found the prose hard to digest and the story drawn out and frankly boring. The characters seemeed one dimensional and there far too many tangents.

Pulitzer Prize winner for 2004, this book is a rich portrayal of slavery and free blacks during the mid-1800s in the US. No Civil War militaria, this book is a profound and deep look of the lives of slaves and their masters--some of whom are black. Left me thinking of the characters long after finishing the book.

I got lost in the book. I became fully involved with the characters and the wonder of the human spirit in all of us. One of the best books I have ever read.

This was actually a good story. Very well written. At times, my book club members thought it was non-fiction and we tried to get more information on the areas and characters. It was simply not my topic of choice for a good read. I am aware that this history took place and this very well could have been a true story, I just don't like to read about it.

This book is brilliant on many levels. It focuses on an aspect of the antebellum south which which few are familiar: ownership of Black slaves by Black people. This in itself makes it important. The story is extraordinarily well-crafted, with incredible characters, description and story line, all presented in deceptively understated prose.

What is most remarkable about this book, however, is that Jones invented the place in which it takes place. Not the state, of course - Virginia is real enough. But the towns, the county, the history - all is fiction. Once one has read the first part of the book it becomes obvious what a feat this is.

Finally, Jones himself is interesting. An insurance adjuster, he wrote in the evenings after work, finally quitting his job to devote himself full-time to writing this amazing novel. He gathered material on Black slave owners in the antebellum south, but decided not to read any of it until after his manuscript was complete. A remarkable book both in how it came to be and the final product.

this was challenging and disturbing. well-written though