The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish - Elsie Blackwell

This was a quiet book, told in first person by Louis Pryor as an old man reflecting on his life.  As a seventeen year-old boy, the levee in his small, Louisiana town was deliberately dynamited unnecessarily in turns out, during the 1927 Mississippi flood.  The damage altered his life and comes to symbolize his loss of innocence.

I was impressed at a woman writer's ability to speak as a man.  She captured perfectly his sorrow and regret at what was lost, decisions made that changed the trajectory of his life.  I liked his father, an illiterate, poor, farmer who becomes superintendent of the logging company.  He explains to his son when criticized that his choices have always been "take it" or "leave it".  He's always chosen to take it as it moved him up in the world regardless of the compromises made.

I would recommend reading this one and will look for the author's first book, Hunger.

Published:  2007  Read: July 2018  Genre: fiction