Review: The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis

I was unsure of this book when I first started it. It was full of words that you wouldn't know unless you grew up with a hobby of reading the dictionary in your spare time. He eventually does overcome this and stop using words that the common reader will not understand.

I wondered why it was stressed that his father had become a lawyer was. It was never actually touched upon besides in references to his father's past as a lawyer. Before Henry L. Aster became the reclusive writer that he was, he was a lawyer for a little firm in Old Buckram. I didn't know why it was important.

The story was rather irrelevant almost until about 200 pages in. It was mostly random description that seemed to have very little to do with anything else. Once it got to the part where the father actually vanished from their lives, it picked up.

Henry, named after his father, spent years reading in his father's study. They would periodically go on adventures up in the woods before the death of his grandmother and his father's subsequent isolation and further alcohol abuse. One day their father just left. There was no proper explanation for it and they didn't know where he had gone. Not long after that, Henry left for college.

He went in for music then when he graduated, he went to law school. This decision paralleled one made nearly twenty years earlier by his father, who had first gone to college for something else and ended up as a lawyer. Much like his father before him, Henry even ended up working at the same law office.

I enjoyed the story. The way Phillip Lewis told it as though it were happening in real time and then in the past at the same time was a nice way to do it. I also liked the inclusion of Story's...well...story, as part of the narrative instead of a huge block of italics very good. It's definitely not clear what happened to his father. I think I guessed it back when we were introduced to his second sister. The story between Henry and Story was very near what happened with his parents. I just wish that we were told what actually happened to Henry, Story, and Threnody.

I rated this story a 5/5 and I would probably re-read it. I've already suggested friends to read it. I received this book from Blogging for Books in return for an honest review.