Book 12: The Unquiet Grave by Sharyn McCrumb

*Note - I tried my hand at scheduling the publication of posts with limited success.  That's why book 12 of the year is out of order.


Format: Kindle
Date Started:  March 6, 2019
Date Finished:  March 12, 2019

While I liked the premise of this book, which is based on the true story of the Greenbrier Ghost, the way the story was put together didn't work for me.  In the beginning, our narrator, Mary Jane, is the mother of the girl, named Zona, who will go on to become the Greenbrier Ghost.  Excellent, I thought, and I was interested in her story.  I found that the author did a good job of capturing the realities of her life on a West Virginia farm through MJ's sparse, plain speech patterns.  I'm here for authentic voices as a way to enhance setting 100%.

Our second narrator is one of the lawyers representing the murderer - Trout.  Side note - that's a killer's name if I've ever heard one, and I didn't need a ghost to point it out.  This is where it went wrong for me.  Rather than staying on topic with the murder and what it was like to be African-American just after the Civil War, we went on extremely long and dull tangents in a mental institution.

To be perfectly honest, I skimmed from about the halfway point of the book because I wanted it to be over.  Once the initial action of the aftermath of the murder and trial was over with, the book lost steam, and I lost all interest.