Back home in good ol NC. I’m skipping Top Ten Tuesday to review a book that comes out today, so enjoy!
Review for "The Comedown" by Rebekah Frumkin (to be published on 17 Apr 2018) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
This book’s ok.
“The Comedown” centers on a missing yellow suitcase full of cash and a drug deal that went wrong in Cleveland on May 8, 1973. Leland Bloom-Mittwoch, a drug addict, witnesses the killing of his dealer, Reggie Marshall, and absconds with the suitcase. The story then follows three generations of the families of the two men involved, one White (the Mittwochs) and one Black (the Marshalls), from the early 1970’s to 2009. Over the years, members of both families search for the yellow suitcase. The suitcase is a bit of a MacGuffin here, taking on a kind of mythic quality as each character doggedly pursues it for reasons of their own.
For me, this book is a compilation of character studies. For that reason it’s heavily populated, with various family members of the major players going in and out of the main narrative. Although the characters are all relevant and connected to one another, it was a struggle for me to stay interested here. This novel definitely explores race, class and addiction, but I don’t know…maybe I just wasn’t the right audience for the ensemble cast approach it uses. Once I began to like, hate, or empathize with someone it was off to another person, time, and place. For me this book just seemed too broad, too many bits and pieces.
The quality of the writing is decent, so Frumkin is definitely a writer to watch. This book will probably get good reviews from other people, so maybe my issues here are simply ones of personal preference.
3 stars.
[Note: A digital copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Henry Holt Co., and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ]
29chapters.com 