Reviewed by Katie
This is a love story
with Americana as the anti-hero. L.C. Moore flirts with cultural ideals
of the good ole days and does nothing to destroy them, only bring them more
fully in to the light. Four young people, coming of age, in two different
timelines give a weathered diary feel to the chapters that enhances the
experiences of dislocation adolescents and young adults often know better than
their parents.And the backdrop of war and the tension increases....
Like a Leo Kotke album,
each suite is uniquely its own yet still part of the larger whole. There
are just enough clichés to make the eras accessible for understanding or
nostalgic, depending on your age. Each perspective is skillfully used to
prevent the characters from becoming trite. There are no secondary
characters. Everyone is a precise note or extended measure for the suite.
We know some of these people. They're our parents, grandparents,
cousins - maybe a neighbor, maybe ourselves. They are the folks we might
not think of as knowing anything about Real Life.
The evocative, tightly
written prose disturbed me even as it held me captive. Choppy sentence
fragments set the mood with conversational narrative that carries us away, back
to where we've never really been, but thought we knew so well because we
studied history and watched the Discovery Channel. Jumping from one
timeline to another with no pattern I could establish made the book seem a bit
longer than it actually was. I wanted more from each chapter, more for each
character; they felt like my family long before the middle of the book. And it
doesn’t take a genius to know the ‘happily ever after’ in war stories is
seldom white picket fences and orange blossoms, so my tension increased with
each turn of the page.
I did not want
to finish the tale but I could not not know. It
made my stomach burn, literally, as I rolled to the last forty pages or so.
This is not a romance in the traditional sense. It is a condensed
epic tale, spanning generations, the conclusion bittersweet. I would not
have chosen this as a book to read but that's why I enjoy reading for Romance
Reviews Magazine, I'm exposed to different explorations of what is a good
romance.
I have two quibbles.
First, the entanglement theory don't work for me, personally. The descriptions of dreams and emotions felt
were too vague in comparison to the strength of the narrative's other
aspects. However, I welcomed the thoughts of what if...
all the same. I still found the individual stories
enthralling, so in the end, the entanglement did not matter, at least to me.
Second, there were many
editing issues in my copy of the text that I did not convert {ex: "Roomer
was he was repeating ninth grade for the third time." "there
was more darkness then light..." “My general approached to things
was….”} I hope these issues have been corrected in the final version.
Unfortunately, in such a tightly written book they Stand Out, especially
in key moments and jarred me brutally from the tale. Even so, I recommend All
I Long For Long Ago Was You as a thoughtful weekend read that will
remain with you for days.
