Here's a novel I was looking forward to having read (and reread) "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter" by Tom Franklin, complex and deep romance with a central character absolutely unforgettable. There they felt the presence of the Nobel Prize William Faulkner. Floods in 1927 in Mississippi inspired him part of the novel "Wild Palms" (Strangely the authors did not mention the fact in the interview which is the end of my edition) but here is very, very far from this great American writer. The characters are flat (some in the cartoon so much that it becomes laughable); the plot is implausible; authors "forget" to shed light on some important elements and I think that they also need a good editor to remove anachronisms. As for the positives - I was quite moved by the story of two federal agents - an orphan boy raised in Chicago by religious (for once loving), blues lover and becomes sniper in France in 1918 during the offensive Meuse - Argonne and his colleague at the gruff Gene Hackman. The authors performed a tour de force in the description of the mighty river that carries all before it. But I wanted more poetic and "intimate" passages like the end of the novel when the female character just thinks of a hammer: "Aim ... That hammer lay at the bottom of the lake That filled the gulley That used to nestle her house. The trusty little hammer Knew no touch now for the purpose of fishes, the undulant long stroke of fat. "
