The Cold Millions by Jess WalterMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
There seemed to be the same character through most of the stories. Not much happens in any of them. They do have a way of placing you quickly in the story, but overall they are okay but not great.
This is a character driven book which pulls you directly into their lives.
Rye Nolan is the main focus, a young teenager who goes on the hobo road after his parents and other siblings died. He finds his brother Gig (Gregory) and they tramp around until settling for a while in Spokane, WA sleeping on the porch of an old Italian woman, who promised they could buy her backyard orchard land to build their own house. Gig meanwhile is taken up by the IWW (International Workers of the World) and their cause for better pay and working conditions for workers, especially the miners. Rye isn’t sure what to believe, but gets pulled into the action when the police chase and attack them after a drunken night that ended sleeping on a baseball field, and end up in an overstuffed jail. And that is the beginning, as there is so much more to the book.
We get a diverse cast of characters and the point of view shifts to several of these, which was done well. The way Walter writes these individual people you get immersed in each of these individual lives, understand their motivations. This isn’t done with all of the main characters, but enough to give us a more rounded view of this brief moment in time.
It’s an interesting fictionalized version of the real events that happened around the free speech movement and a brief time of the IWW in the beginning of the 20th century.
Thanks to HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment