Review: Crooked Hallelujah

Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Flawed but beautiful, Crooked Hallelujah is an intimate road trip of a book portraying the stormy life of three generations of Cherokee (though this fact actually barely features in the narrative itself) women hailing from Oklahoma. Sporadically narrated by a variety of tertiary characters, we most often look through the eyes of either Justine or her daughter Reeny as they each attempt to find their way in the world.

To my mind, two things make this book both special and poignant. One is the sweet simplicity of its prose. There's no overwroughtness here, no artificial desire to dress up the writing in more layers than it needs. Its sharp and uncompromising in parts, and it lays things bare instead of padding them up. Ironically, this results in something that is far from dry or boring or dull despite some part of me actually that it should be boring or dull. I think that is remarkable.

The other one is the characterization itself. Simply put, it feels like the author has really tapped into the minds of Lula, Justine, and Reeny, and like a magnet, we are simply drawn to learn about them. That is how I felt, at least.

Unfortunately, there are also two glaring flaws that kept this book from being truly outstanding. First and foremost, are the narrations from the tertiary (at best) characters like Moses and Ferrel that not only break away from the book's subject matter, but they don't really add anything in return. I kept hoping they would be made relevant, but by the book's end this simply did not happen. I can't help but think those chapters could have been better utilized by exploring more about Reeny, who basically carries the first half of the book and then disappointingly fades for long swathes of the second half.

The second flaw is more insidious. Up until about the halfway point of the novel, I feel like I can put a finger on what the author is trying to do, and the author herself also knows both what she is trying to do as well as how to do it. But this certainty vanishes as the book starts to resemble a random assortment of jumps between various loosely-related characters more the character-driven... something it really wanted to be.

It was sad, really. I will look forward to what the author writes next, certainly, and hope that perhaps next time she is better able to keep the writing from running off a side-path.

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