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Under The Harrow (2010)

by Mark Dunn(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1596923377 (ISBN13: 9781596923379)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

MacAdam/Cage Publishing

review 1: Oh, how I absolutely LOVE Mark Dunn! From the creative mind of Ella Minnow Pea and Ibid (leaving out Welcome to Higby because it's a plain novel) comes another tour de force. Sort of like M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, but with a Victorian, Dickensian slant: this thriller reads like a boring Jane Austen novel! And therein lies another example of Dunn's genius: he wraps a style around a great story. Can't help but love and hate the intentional snail's pace of the plot, reeking with alliteration, etc. Dunn is a gem that not many people know about.
review 2: Although this novel is set in western Pennsylvania in 2004, the characters in the odd town of Dingley Dell seem more suited to a Dickens novel than to a novel about twenty-first century Americans. Their la... morenguage, technology, and culture seem more like 1880 than 2004. And while they are aware of the existence of those who live outside the borders of their town, they do not travel beyond their borders nor do they receive visits from the "Outsiders." The novel is narrated by one Frederick Trimmers, Esq., who was a resident of Dingley Dell, and his first person narrative is convincing, except when he uses it to tell stories that he had not witnessed. Those chapters slide into third person point of view with occasional awkward sentences like, "'Where are you taking me?' asked my nephew. A book written after 2004 (published in fall of 2010) could certainly get away with keeping that third person point of view when reporting scenes Frederick Trimmers had not seen for himself. But that is a small quibble. The story and the concepts behind it are worth reading. Once hooked into the characters and story, the book just pulls a reader along at quite a pace. While being familiar with Dickens' work and time makes the language accessible at once, the reader with no such reading experience need not fear reading this book. The suspense will keep such a reader faithful to the end. less

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