{"id":369,"date":"2018-12-31T11:59:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T11:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=369"},"modified":"2018-12-31T11:59:57","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T11:59:57","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-37","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=369","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>FICTION<\/p>\n

James Lee Burke<\/span><\/p>\n

House of the Rising Sun<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-5011-0710-8 (also available as an audio book, an ebook, and on Audible), 448 pgs., $27.99<\/p>\n

December 1, 2015<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 1916, Pancho Villa is raiding across the border,<\/span> and Texas Ranger Hackberry Holland is searching for his long-lost son, Ishmael, a captain in the US Army, in Mexico, \u201ca feral land, its energies as raw and ravenous as a giant predator that ingested the na\u00efve and incautious.\u201d Hackberry doesn\u2019t find Ishmael this time, but he does run afoul of the Mexican Army and Arnold Beckman, an international arms dealer, escaping with a religious artifact that had been in Beckman\u2019s possession, which may or may not be the Holy Grail.<\/p>\n

House of the Rising Sun<\/span><\/a><\/span> is an apocalyptic tale of addictions \u2014 alcohol, Morpheus, pain, love, power \u2014 which rob us of mercy, kindness, and human dignity. \u201cI have nothing of value to impart,\u201d Hackberry says. \u201cMy life has been dedicated to Pandemonium. That\u2019s a place in hell John Milton wrote about. That also means I\u2019m an authority on chaos and confusion and messing things up.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the action centers around Hackberry, the real stars of this tale are women: Maggie Basset, Hackberry\u2019s wife, whose \u201cdecisions seemed made for her by someone else, perhaps a little girl who lived in a dark place inside her, a place where Maggie the adult would never go by herself\u201d; Ruby Dansen, spirited union organizer, Ishmael\u2019s mother, and Hackberry\u2019s true love; and Beatrice DeMolay, the kind and cunning brothel owner who saves Hackberry\u2019s life more than once.<\/p>\n

House of the Rising Sun<\/span> is drenched in gorgeous imagery. The Texas cottonwood leaves \u201ctrembled with the thinness of rice paper\u201d and the lightning of an approaching storm \u201cbegan as a flicker and then spread through thousands of miles of firmament in seconds and died inside an ocean of purple smoke.\u201d Mexico is a place \u201cwhere peasants wore depressions with their knees in the stone steps of seventeenth-century cathedrals, and where the light was harsher and brighter than it should have been and the colors were so vivid they jittered when you looked at them too long.\u201d<\/p>\n

As always, James Lee Burke\u2019s dialogue is smart and sharp. \u201cGod sent you here to show us the fallacy of white superiority,\u201d Hackberry says to his neighbor who has burned the cabins where his former slaves live. \u201cDon\u2019t hide your light under a basket. Many are called, but few are chosen.\u201d The plot is simpler than it seems, allowing the characters and language to shine. The pace is even until, approaching the climax as the characters converge, Burke employs a very effective rapid-cycling technique between the narratives, conveying the urgency and speed of events as he rushes toward a resolution that is as satisfying as it is unexpected.<\/p>\n

Disguised as crime novels and historical Westerns, Burke\u2019s fiction is archetypal philosophy, combining classical Greek myth with the scope of biblical themes: the existence of evil, the will to violence and greed, the possibility of redemption, the impossibility of atonement, whether forgiveness can be earned or is a gift, and the nature of power. With its touches of magical realism, House of the Rising Sun will make you believe in portents.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}