Monday
Mar272006
BOOKS: BACK TO WANDO PASSO
Monday, March 27, 2006 at 05:44PM
Available May 1, 2006 - pre-order at Amazon.com
This review based on the Advance Reader's Edition from HarperCollins
BACK TO WANDO PASSO
BACK TO WANDO PASSO is a wild, truly epic, ride through Southern history, plantation life, slavery, The Civil War, and black magic. This novel is as big as Gone With The Wind, in scope and subject, but it's not Scarlett and Tara -- it's Ransom Hill, a burned-out rock star stumbling into a new century, yet haunted by the Civil War-era past of his wife's ancestral home, Wando Passo, a slave-era rice plantation in South Carolina.
Ransom's modern-day story, trying to pull his life together and save his marriage and family, parallels a Civil War family saga of betrayal and deception, told through intermittent flashbacks.
There is so much to this book, you can get completely lost at times, especially when the author throws in poetic allegories and allusions, and an abundance of Spanish, Cuban language and tradition. It all comes to a stunning conclusion, a breathtaking resolution for all the various characters whose lives are intertwined.
BACK TO WANDO PASSO is a novel that will stay with you -- haunting -- if you can make it through.
* * * * *
Beyond the review, I have to mention the masterful writing and use of language by the author David Payne in BACK TO WANDO PASSO. I've never read this author before, and I am in awe of his descriptive language and truly elegant turns of phrase -- downright flowery at times, but so sensory, you can see what he is describing, hear the sounds, smell the scents, etc. It is remarkable.
Here are just two examples, worthy of mention, that I enjoyed (of course, because of the allegorical references to books! ;-):
"And now she kisses him, and the kiss is like a book that seizes them and neither can put down. At the end of every chapter, they're compelled to turn the page, into a new adventure, and it goes on and on, and they're lost in it and lose all sense of time, and when it ends, they're refreshed like dreamers who awake and have no idea how long they've slept."
(page 342)
"The journey is a book with many chapters, and each chapter was an adventure and a stage, and some of them were wonderful, some were sad. There are so many now that he's forgotten most of them, but it doesn't matter how many he's forgotten, all that matters is the adventure he's on now, and what will happen next." (page 415)
This review based on the Advance Reader's Edition from HarperCollins
BACK TO WANDO PASSO
by David Payne
(William Morrow, May 2006)
BACK TO WANDO PASSO is a wild, truly epic, ride through Southern history, plantation life, slavery, The Civil War, and black magic. This novel is as big as Gone With The Wind, in scope and subject, but it's not Scarlett and Tara -- it's Ransom Hill, a burned-out rock star stumbling into a new century, yet haunted by the Civil War-era past of his wife's ancestral home, Wando Passo, a slave-era rice plantation in South Carolina.
Ransom's modern-day story, trying to pull his life together and save his marriage and family, parallels a Civil War family saga of betrayal and deception, told through intermittent flashbacks.
There is so much to this book, you can get completely lost at times, especially when the author throws in poetic allegories and allusions, and an abundance of Spanish, Cuban language and tradition. It all comes to a stunning conclusion, a breathtaking resolution for all the various characters whose lives are intertwined.
BACK TO WANDO PASSO is a novel that will stay with you -- haunting -- if you can make it through.
Beyond the review, I have to mention the masterful writing and use of language by the author David Payne in BACK TO WANDO PASSO. I've never read this author before, and I am in awe of his descriptive language and truly elegant turns of phrase -- downright flowery at times, but so sensory, you can see what he is describing, hear the sounds, smell the scents, etc. It is remarkable.
Here are just two examples, worthy of mention, that I enjoyed (of course, because of the allegorical references to books! ;-):
"And now she kisses him, and the kiss is like a book that seizes them and neither can put down. At the end of every chapter, they're compelled to turn the page, into a new adventure, and it goes on and on, and they're lost in it and lose all sense of time, and when it ends, they're refreshed like dreamers who awake and have no idea how long they've slept."
(page 342)
"The journey is a book with many chapters, and each chapter was an adventure and a stage, and some of them were wonderful, some were sad. There are so many now that he's forgotten most of them, but it doesn't matter how many he's forgotten, all that matters is the adventure he's on now, and what will happen next." (page 415)