Reviews

A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read

mallorykjorgensen's review against another edition

3.0

I wish I could give books 3 1/2 stars. This book is a good example, because I liked it, but I can't say that I REALLY liked it. There were just too many times throughout the story where I either got lost in the language or truly just had no idea what the author's point was. However, these feelings did not really hinder by ability to understand the plot or miss out on anything important. Now that I have kind of gotten used to Read's writing style, I am anxious to begin the Crazy School (this book's sequel) to see if I can enjoy that book even more.

melissakuzma's review against another edition

3.0

3 1/2 stars

This is not my usual kind of book but my mom read it and lived it and have it to me. I probably wouldn't have even finished it if she hadn't recommended it to me, but I ended up liking it. I couldn't wait to get on the train today to finish it. It was very dark and more of a hard- boiled mystery so if you like that kind of thing I'd recommend it.

barmatron's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

3.75

barmatron's review against another edition

4.0

Good, I little bit trippy, a story from the before times.

lisaeirene's review against another edition

3.0

This book was clunky. I really liked the characters and the main story but the book would go on other paths where the story became the main character's family. I didn't find that as interesting.

tbsims's review against another edition

5.0

Very talented writer, love the style.
excellent quotes - the last time I answered no, I hadn't heard the question.
abercrombe and fitch...of the Roosevelt going hunting tradition, not the rent boys in fire island tradition.

pokecol's review against another edition

Spoiler

This books struck me as weird the moment I started reading. Another in my small collection of yet to be consumed mystery novels I picked up from a collection a long time ago.
It primarily strikes me as a 'Bell-curve' Book. I find that stupidity matches genius in a lot of way and the grandest deviation is in the normalcy of people. To a fool, greatness looks identical to idiocy. To an erudite of any field, stupidity looks the same but with the background wealth of knowledge and experience they know why and where the path to the conclusions were reached under different meanings. This book reads to me that all the talents of great penmanship has been replicated but with no real understanding of why.
The first chapter is an odd description of a house burning twice, which is supposed to be some foreshadowing for the upcoming plot and a tone-setter with everything going on - it was acceptable but we move away from it immediately. Chapter 2 is a long-winded meal with extended family in a way that made me put down the book with a modicum of concern. Every - single - sentence, is deviated from in the following sentence by something utterly unrelated. So much so in every moment that it made it near impossible to flow with the story-telling. For instance, a conversation was coming into an uncomfortable setting for this grandmother figure, and so ever other sentence went to making it clear she was trying not to listen or shy away from the conversation without really saying she didn't want it to go on. People do act like this, yes, but they do so because they want to avoid the confrontation of speaking about the thing which they find uncomfortable. Every sentence after the topic proceeds, this senior-aged woman does something slightly more loud and petulant to interrupt the discussion in a way that - presented by the author - is supposed to be understated, but is frankly just dumb and mishandled. Additionally as every couple of lines was interrupted it made following the exact topic very challenging without re-reading lines.
This kind of thing happened quite a handful of times until I released I was barely processing any of the information the page was trying to give me.
The book was trying so extremely hard to be salient and prolific between each sentence that it reads like a teenagers take at understanding dual-motifs and themes.
I put down the book for a while here because I wasn't certain what to think - it wasn't as though I wasn't enjoying it, nothing had offended me - but it was not grabbing me and had myriad obvious issues.
I just picked up Chapter 3 and in just a few short pages I felt so utterly lost by how every single paragraph went somewhere completely different. I don't know how we got to the Hitler comparison or the weird line about a 'sweaty woman with a gun' being in anyway a normal thing for a partner to say to their boyfriend. A nickname like Bunny is full on gross and would never be used in a scene of genuine concern as it was. I read this chapter less than 3 minutes ago and can recall nearly nothing but confusion, it was that much of a mess. There was talk about the grain and actions the two characters were taking between strangely spoken sentences and it just felt like, again, a young author trying to fill a scene with things they "think" were key to writing - but in reality bloat and confuse the moment by a long shot. Flowery and excessive words were used with such frequency in tandem with subject matters and sentence structures so often, that even as a person who prides theirself on linguistic understanding, I was completely outside of comprehension. Tigers running around butter?? What is going on??
There as some topic behind this really bizarre chapter about our main character battling with the fact the name of a person they once knew just came up in a potentially crucial investigation topic and yet none of it read to me as being even slightly connected to that pretty important subject matter.
I could probably read more and the rest of the book as the chapters appear short and I wasn't having any major challenging going from page to page, but I just don't see a reason to, especially if its going to have veritably unfollowable dialogue and scene context throughout the entire novel. There just isn't really a point to reading it. I don't feel happy about dropping it because I feel I haven't even gotten a feel for what the novel is about yet - but it is by this point that should start to be coming together and its not just not coming together, it is fully running away from coming together at all.

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In fact, reading a little more as I don't feel good about dropping it. Immediately in some other subject matter again with no clause to the effects of plot. Shooting range. Within a few moments we deviate from what is happening, again, so that our main character can educate us on some topic loosely related to the action taking place but has no real bearing on anything in a meaningful way, slowing the pace, clunking the scene and moment. Perhaps attempting to lay out metaphor with the use of a firing-range with shooting ahead of the discs or whatever, might be a literary device for future events, but its so heavy-handed and basically the same as what has tried to be done in nearly every scene it is next to impossible to tell if it is just flak or something worth the consideration.
Yeah, I can't do this. Every single scene is trying to do 2 stories at once. A playful and interesting dichotomy between the present happenings and larger story is a good literary device, and good when seldom used. It is used here in every single moment at all times, always. It makes reading impossible. Why is the Chapter AFTER the realisation chapter the one to think about the recent revelation? Why now some whenever at a shooting range of indeterminable time since the previous event?
Very next moment feels like the author wants to push plot along in this unrelated to plot set-piece, but doesn't even know how. 
I don't want to rag on the book because it genuinely feels like the author doesn't know what she's doing, and that bothers me the most.
I'll be dropping the book after all. I have too much to expound on nearly every paragraph with criticism and that alone is enough to make it too hard to read.

lian_tanner's review against another edition

4.0

REALLY enjoyed this - more so than Read's second book, which I read first. The main character Maddie is so very human - an ex-wild girl who is now married to a man she loves; a young woman whose family has let her down over and over again. The whole American class thing is so beautifully and wittily laid out, and the mystery is well handled. I had NO idea who the real murderer was, right up to the point where Maddie worked it out. Great racking up of tension, great ending.

knboereads's review against another edition

5.0

This is actually the second time I've read this book and I loved it just as much as I did the first time. Read's narrator, Madeline Dare, is not only someone I would love to sit down with and have a coffee, but she's also someone who can tell a damn good story in her own words. Despite the generation gap with some of the references and innuendos (the book starts in the year I was born) I sailed along with the narrative just as joyfully as I did the first time. Not to mention, that Dean, ooh boy, is Madeline lucky. This time I kept picturing him as Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester, which everything ten times better. I had forgotten some of the plot points in the time since I last read the book, and so some scenes still hit me as hard as the first time, perhaps even more hard, as I read the book with more experienced eyes. This is a series I would read again and again. It just hits all the right spots for me.

optmst's review against another edition

3.0

This was our June Book Club selection. I must say I didn't start getting into the book until at least half-way through it. I found myself not relating to any of the characters, none really likable. However, the author did a very good job showing class distinctions in this country. Food for thought. Our book club doesn't read mysteries so it's a bit of a mystery as to how it even got on our list.