Gone to the Forest

By: Katie Kitamura

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

From the critically acclaimed author of The Longshot comes this gripping saga about the destruction of a family, a home, and a way of life.

Set on a struggling farm in a colonial country teetering on the brink of civil war, Gone to the Forest is a tale of family drama and political turmoil in which fiery storytelling melds with daring, original prose. Since his mother’s death, Tom and his father have fashioned a strained domestic peace, where everything is frozen under the old man’s vicious control. But when a young woman named Carine arrives at the farm, the tension between the two men escalates to the breaking point.

Hailed by The Boston Globe as "a major talent", Kitamura shines in this powerful new novel.

©2012 Katie Kitamura (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Stay away

Synopsis: life is good. Then it's not so good. Then it gets worse. Then it gets a lot worse. Then it gets really bad. And then you die.

I can't understand why someone would write a book like this, and if you knew better, why you would read it. It's like dropping a flowerpot off the top of a tall building and chronicling its descent until it smashes on the concrete below. That's it. There are no plot twists. There is no character development. It's like watching a few wooden puppets whose strings are pulled by a rather dim-witted robot.

That's the content, and then there's the form. The book seems to be written for (low) grade schoolers. "The old man was dying. He was nearing the end of his life. The life force was ebbing in him. His force was spent." We got it. We got it the first time, and the second time, and the third time and we really didn't need the fourth time. Is this supposed to be Hemingway manque?

And "the old man" goes to the rotten heart of the book. He's one of the three central characters, but he doesn't even have a name. He's not a character, he's a caricature. They all are. They don't begin to make sense as human beings. A young man who has no interest in his bride but lets his father take her. The bride who walks naked through a crowd of farm hands in the middle of a revolution and is surprised what happens next. The place they live in is equally a caricature, a vague amalgam of various countries below the equator.

I read about a book a week, and I don't often get moved to write a review, but sometimes a public service announcement is in order.