Book Review #58 - Tallgrass

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I decided that I wanted to post every day this month. It's a mental challenge more than anything. Besides, I've got eleven book reviews to write. And I'm counting them as posts:)

I read Tallgrass over a month ago and was so excited by its opening chapters. I thought I was getting To Kill A Mockingbird but with innocent Japanese detainees in camps during World War II instead of an innocent black man detained for rape in the south. It had the requisite small town setting with a few violently ignorant residents. It had the naive daughter narrating the story with a do-the-right-thing-even-if-it's-unpopular father as her hero. Like I said, the flavor was there.

But the taste was not. I don't know if the author, Sandra Dallas, was trying to write a copycat novel or purposely veered off track, but Tallgrass quickly fell far from the Mockingbird tree. The characters were boxy and predictable, the plot stretched too thin with an unrelated murder mystery (was I supposed to suspect the Japanese in the nearby camp? Because I didn't. The author never develops the suspicion for the reader with Rennie as the narrator) and the dialogue feels unnaturally scripted.

Mostly, I felt disappointed because Dallas didn't write enough about the Japanese camps. Its existence around the Colorado town of Ellis is placed so far into the background of her story, that having it as a part of the story's setting actually seems unnecessary. Sure, she included a few Japanese characters who came to work for Rennie's father on his sugar beet farm, but they were as boxy as the white folks. Why bother?

I wish I hadn't.