Review of 'Good, Brother'
Good, Brother is...
- Brotherhood, family
- Coming of age. A delicate dance between doing boy things and doing man things.
- Clinging to a dying past; a struggle to keep home, home.
- Long, repetitive, cleverly interwoven sentences that drag the reader from scene to scene mercilessly by her hair.
- Poetry? Probably prose poetry.
- An examination and exploration of womanhood. Girl is larger
than life, and she takes the brothers on journeys.
- Violence- an extension of boyhood (it is as if the protagonists struggle to tear everything down just to build it back up again, to see what’s on the inside).
- Girl- Hope, growth (sometimes literally), god, faith,
spirituality, love, comfort.
- Woman (mother)- Enemy of mud, change, the unknown, death.
- Father- Grown up boy.
- Dark, gothic; Southern gothic?
- Lord of the Flies-esque?
Good, Brother is not...
- Concise
- "An easy read"
- Light
- To be taken for surface value. The symbols are not few and are not stagnant; they change with the development of the brothers (example: mud is mud, lifeblood, creation, destruction...)
- A traditional text
- One story
- Linear
- A book I will read again in full; though I find myself reading excerpts from time to time.
My problem with the format of this review is that Good, Brother, to me, does not seem like it can be so easily dichotomized. Like, it is on a level of multiples rather than a base level of what it "is and is not." Maybe a piece of paper with a bunch of imagistic words and phrases would be a more appropriate review for the style of the book. This seems like it would work for an academic text or a linear plot-based narrative.
ReplyDeleteI love that this is a pro and con list, but I agree with Ryan that I'm not sure the text can be so easily categorized.
ReplyDeleteexcellent format, but I agree with the previous comments, I don't know if everything is so easily classified.
ReplyDelete