I have been a Barbara Kingsolver fan for quite some time. I have great fondness for her earlier books The Bean Trees and its sequel, Pigs In Heaven... and I am pretty sure I read her short-story collection, Animal Dreams, as well as her essay collection High Tide in Tucson... and, of course, I even "met" her at a book signing for The Poisonwood Bible, which I thought was a bit of a turn in her writing, a big book with big issues and that is only confirmed in another her latest book, The Lacuna.
Kingsolver's protagonist (ultimately) is a novelist, who has his ideas for the titles of his own books shot down by his publisher and I can only imagine Kingsolver may have had the same debate in this pretty oddly titled book (my guess is she won that battle). But while I won't give it away here, it is well-explained in the book and certainly a motif throughout the book (look at me being all fancy and throwing out the literary words!).
Now let's see if I can try to explain what the book is about just a bit (you know I don't like to give too much away). Pretty much we follow the life of Harrison William Shepherd starting in the 1930s. Born of a Mexican mother and an American father, he splits his time between those two countries, spending most of his youth in Mexico and eventually stumbling onto the some real-life historical characters in the husband-wife artist duo of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, along with their eventual houseguest, Russian exile Leon Trotsky. So for starters, this is a piece of historical fiction, but oh so much more!
But before I go on, I have to say I had really concerns about this book especially in the first half. While I know I am not supposed to "rate" a book until its done, I have to admit I do think about it along the way and I was really starting to wonder if I was going to give a Kingsolver book just 3 stars! It wasn't that it was bad, but it was a bit of a slog. Her prose always kept me in the game, but I often found myself in a cycle of being engaged in the story but then mentally wondering off. Likewise, I am always a bit wary of the use of "real" people in fiction, especially when they are as prominently featured as they are in this novel. Pretty much they have to turn into fictional characters and without any real knowledge of Rivera, Kahlo, and Trotsky (except for some very basics) on my part, I am thinking that was throwing me off-course a bit as well.
But when the narrative shifted to back to the United States, it all started clicking for me. The book now seemed to have a forward momentum and perhaps just coincidence (or not) given what I just mentioned, the focus shifted to the fully fictional characters of Shepherd and his assistant, Mrs. Brown. Interestingly enough, having now read some reviews on Goodeads, I see that there are many folks who preferred the first half over the second half of the book. I always find it interesting to read stuff like that, folks reading the same thing and having two totally opposite views, though I can kind of understand the "preference" difference here.
However, in retrospect see, and even appreciate, what Kingsolver was doing... being very slow and deliberate in creating a foundation for what ends up being a truly epic novel on several fronts. As mentioned above, it is most certainly a piece of historical fiction, but also a coming of age story and since it is about a writer, definitely an inside look at the creative process. But what slowly unfolded for me was how Kingsolver was using the past as a way of discussing the present. I am guessing Kingsolver may even be a bit more left-leaning than myself (and that's saying something!), but there she certainly seems to be thinking of lot of our country's checkered past is repeating itself in today's debates about stuff like patriotism and a 'real' America. As I said earlier, there's a lot going on here!
While it wavered, I am glad I kept my faith in Kingsolver and kept plugging along. It ended up being a truly wonderful book in which I felt all the effort paid off. I can't remember the last time I felt a book took a good 200 or so pages to get into and likewise I am not sure I have had an opinion turnaround of thinking a book looking to be 3 stars and really contemplating whether it was 5 stars at the end of it. For the record, I gave it 4 stars on GoodReads, but upped it to 4.5 stars on my official unofficial scale.
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