A review by jiujensu
Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss
3.0
This was not bad. I found it in a thrift store and my husband wanted to read it, so I read it too.
I didn't know anything about these particular twins, but they were alive around the time of our Civil War. The story is fictional, so I don't know which parts are known historical fact and which are fabricated. The story alternates between their young life and their lives in Wilksboro, North Carolina.
I could sympathize with their young selves, trying to figure out locomotion, learning Gung Fu from their father - being kids and dealing with the handicap. They were basically stolen from their parents at a young age to be caged and treated like an animal, worse than a prisoner. The kids were sure the King of Siam would kill them, but he ended up showing them around.
The North Carolina part was a typical racist southern Civil War saga with a few interesting bits about how they handled marriage. I don't know if this was true, besides marrying sisters (that part is true), but the reason the mother was pushing them to marry was because one of the sisters loved a slave and they'd given the usual cry of rape for situations like that and killed the man and now she was a pariah. Eng was angry with his wife when he suspected his wife loved the man and she wasn't actually raped. He wasn't mad about killing an innocent man or about slavery....which didn't endear him to me.
I found it odd how Eng compartmentalized and didn't really connect his treatment, really slavery, with his owning 20 slaves. To his credit, I guess, when a Union soldier arrived, he just watched the slaves leave and didn't really get upset. The discussions in the book about the Civil War are pretty terrible and show the misguided confederate point of view I guess.
Otherwise, it's just a story about twins rather unhappily married. One desired solitude and never got it. The other didn't narrate, so I don't know what he thought. And it's an entirely fictional account, so none of the personalities I came to know were real.
I didn't know anything about these particular twins, but they were alive around the time of our Civil War. The story is fictional, so I don't know which parts are known historical fact and which are fabricated. The story alternates between their young life and their lives in Wilksboro, North Carolina.
I could sympathize with their young selves, trying to figure out locomotion, learning Gung Fu from their father - being kids and dealing with the handicap. They were basically stolen from their parents at a young age to be caged and treated like an animal, worse than a prisoner. The kids were sure the King of Siam would kill them, but he ended up showing them around.
The North Carolina part was a typical racist southern Civil War saga with a few interesting bits about how they handled marriage. I don't know if this was true, besides marrying sisters (that part is true), but the reason the mother was pushing them to marry was because one of the sisters loved a slave and they'd given the usual cry of rape for situations like that and killed the man and now she was a pariah. Eng was angry with his wife when he suspected his wife loved the man and she wasn't actually raped. He wasn't mad about killing an innocent man or about slavery....which didn't endear him to me.
I found it odd how Eng compartmentalized and didn't really connect his treatment, really slavery, with his owning 20 slaves. To his credit, I guess, when a Union soldier arrived, he just watched the slaves leave and didn't really get upset. The discussions in the book about the Civil War are pretty terrible and show the misguided confederate point of view I guess.
Otherwise, it's just a story about twins rather unhappily married. One desired solitude and never got it. The other didn't narrate, so I don't know what he thought. And it's an entirely fictional account, so none of the personalities I came to know were real.