Great review - you put so much time and heart into these, it's amazing! ie the elephant: I wonder sometimes if people have any brains at all. And thanks for the warning on the spoiler - just the wording of the warning makes me want to run in the opposite direction. :P
Thank you, and yes, I was definitely thinking of you (among others) when creating the spoilers. I looked up the elephant story online because the way McCrumb presented it, it sounded like the kind of thing that by rights *should* be a hoax but unfortunately isn't -- but even with what she wrote, I wasn't quite prepared for what I found. It's the kind of pointless cruelty that just makes me very angry, even if it happened 100 years ago and there's nothing anybody can do about it anymore.
That said, it's really a great novel -- fairly obviously set in the 1990s, so at the beginning I was a bit worried that it might end up coming across a tad dated, but I wasn't even halfway in when it hit me just *how* topical it is for what is happening today, and probably nowhere more so than in that part of the U.S. (and similar areas).
That said, it's really a great novel -- fairly obviously set in the 1990s, so at the beginning I was a bit worried that it might end up coming across a tad dated, but I wasn't even halfway in when it hit me just *how* topical it is for what is happening today, and probably nowhere more so than in that part of the U.S. (and similar areas).