Book review: Days of Cain by J.R. Dunn
Oct. 22nd, 2010 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroyPrint date: 1997 (20s: 1, 50s: 1, 60s: 2, 70s: 6, 80s: 6, 90s: 5, 00s: 12)
This is an Auschwitz book. It uses time travel as a lens to examine the morality of the Holocaust, but it's not a time travel book in anything other than the technical sense. It's Schindler's List. It presents you with a situation that no sane human can take in and carefully points out details that emphasize its depths of cruelty.
It's not light reading, but I found it very easy to keep myself engaged. The emotional tone is just right, neither too saccharine nor too brutal but still authentic. The writing draws you in. Let me put it this way: the book starts with the grand-daddy of all time travel cliches--a failed attempt to kill Hitler--but I decided to keep reading anyway.
However, the ending was deeply problematic for me. Out of the four central characters, one had an ending that felt like it worked. One broke by the end, but if felt like there wasn't enough internal lead-up to the event. One was redeemed when they shouldn't have been-- in what could have been a grand gesture if the method of redemption hadn't appeared in the last 20 pages of the book. And one died as almost a footnote: their death never shown, the consequences of it barely touched upon. Not only that, but there's a secular/religious thing at the very end that aggravates the hell out of me as a humanist. There are some patterns that shouldn't be repeated, and I'm not talking about the camps.
It's a book that made me think and feel, and it's a book that I respect a great deal. But the only surprise is one I cannot accept.
Verdict: Worth reading once, will recycle. (20/60 keepers)
Page count: 359 (11747 total)
Completed: 33 (16 female authors, 17 male authors)
Rejected: 27 (15 male authors, 12 female authors)
Next book due: Thu. 11/4
This is an Auschwitz book. It uses time travel as a lens to examine the morality of the Holocaust, but it's not a time travel book in anything other than the technical sense. It's Schindler's List. It presents you with a situation that no sane human can take in and carefully points out details that emphasize its depths of cruelty.
It's not light reading, but I found it very easy to keep myself engaged. The emotional tone is just right, neither too saccharine nor too brutal but still authentic. The writing draws you in. Let me put it this way: the book starts with the grand-daddy of all time travel cliches--a failed attempt to kill Hitler--but I decided to keep reading anyway.
However, the ending was deeply problematic for me. Out of the four central characters, one had an ending that felt like it worked. One broke by the end, but if felt like there wasn't enough internal lead-up to the event. One was redeemed when they shouldn't have been-- in what could have been a grand gesture if the method of redemption hadn't appeared in the last 20 pages of the book. And one died as almost a footnote: their death never shown, the consequences of it barely touched upon. Not only that, but there's a secular/religious thing at the very end that aggravates the hell out of me as a humanist. There are some patterns that shouldn't be repeated, and I'm not talking about the camps.
It's a book that made me think and feel, and it's a book that I respect a great deal. But the only surprise is one I cannot accept.
Verdict: Worth reading once, will recycle. (20/60 keepers)
Page count: 359 (11747 total)
Completed: 33 (16 female authors, 17 male authors)
Rejected: 27 (15 male authors, 12 female authors)
Next book due: Thu. 11/4