Title: Over The Top!! Over Long & Sometimes Overwrought
Product review: Wonderful evocation of 19th century rural life. Brave attempt to write a fictional "reflective" biography of John Brown. Gives a reader an authentic feel for slavery as the all corrosive political/moral issue in pre-civil war America.Ultimately an almost Great American Novel undone by poor editing, literary trickery and a repetitively pathetic narrator.At 758 pages the novel is overlong for even such a mighty subject as John Brown. The narrator, Owen Brown is so artlessly drawn that after 50 pages he has nothing new to say and his occassional whinning soliloquies are more irrritating then revealing.It appears Mr. Banks'fame has intimidated his editor. Too bad. This near great book could have been better.
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