Archive - October 7, 2014

Rush of Shadows (historical fiction) by Catherine Bell (Brazil 1966–68) Washington Writers Publishing House October 2014 384 pages $17.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Reilly Ridgell (Micronesia 1971–73) • Here’s Catherine Bell’s first sentence of her novel, Rush of Shadows: It was a beautiful country, though I hated and feared it, coming over the mountains with the wagon staggering on a gimpy wheel, black crags towering over the track, the sky blue and thick as a flatiron, and the vultures turning and turning on the hot wind, waiting for somebody to die. Wow. Now here was some finely crafted prose worthy to open a novel. Was the whole book to be this way? Well it was, and much of the many themes woven together in this story of the settling of northern California can be discerned in that first sentence. Especially the vultures. And as I read through the book I was . . .