James P. Nettum

True History Presented Like a Folk Tale

Revisado: 04-15-20

I feel like our country has an odd relationship with the Great Depression. My grandparents were children when it happened, and my last grandparent died four years ago shortly after surpassing her hundredth birthday. An entire generation in the US has reached voting age without having that very personal connection to a defining moment of 20th Century history.

Thankfully there are books like Daughter of the White River. It may be categorized as True Crime, but that doesn’t do it justice. (Pun intended.) Yes, many crimes are perpetrated in it. But this is not a story that could be told by a podcast presenting gruesome details, or in the street-to-courtroom format of the various Law and Order shows, or by a series of Joe Friday voice-overs. Because this is very personal history, and the crimes that occurred cannot be neatly categorized as the inciting incident of a traditional narrative.

Daughter of the White River is multiple people’s stories woven together in the years before and after the crimes in question took place. Because most of the people were living in the Arkansas Delta, it is the Delta’s history. The Great Depression is a shadow that slowly blankets everything, consuming everyone’s lives even as unthinkable acts temporarily draw attention away from it. We the readers follow the lives of the Delta’s very real people, and events as mundane as skipping rocks or school are given the same attention as ones that could be considered scandalous. Through these details, we live history on a micro level rather than learn it on an academic one.

Special focus must be given to the narration by S. J. Tucker. Her vocal performance is best described as “earthy”; sometimes rough as tree bark, other times soft as rose petals, and always rich as soil. It is absolutely what a book like this needs. A bombastic performance would make it unbelievably romantic, and a completely subdued one would make it luridly ugly. S. J. Tucker presents it like everyone’s favorite relative speaking under the old oak tree. You accept her words as a simple story, and they stay with you because they are so much more than that.

This is history hidden under the presentation of a folktale. It’s not too short, not too long. It teaches without lecturing. It entertains without exaggerating. And it makes sure we remember what happened not that long ago, when we are at risk of repeating mistakes of the past.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Spooky, gothic, tragic, romantic

Revisado: 10-18-19

This adaption makes this story timeless, and the cast's performance is top notch. (And the Doctor Who nostalgia trip is an unexpected bonus.)

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