Title: Rush of Shadows
Author: Catherine Bell
Synopsis: When American pioneers set their hearts on a California valley where Indians had been living for thousands of years, a period of uneasy appraisal emerged, followed by conflict and soon enough by genocide. The epic greed and violence of the 1850's and 60's has been brushed aside by history, conveniently forgotten in the pride of conquest. Willful ignorance and cruelty, terror and desperation were common in that time, but there were moments too of nobility and compassion, ingenuity and forgiveness, qualities which might have prevailed if certain things had been different. Rush of Shadows brings to life two freethinking women, Mellie, a white, and Bah
My Review:
Rush of Shadows is a must read for historical novels. The story takes place on an American period that is well known though is focused on the difficult relationships between Native Americans and the new settlers.
The story is narrated as a diary by the set of different characters though its main focus is the frail friendship that borns between Mellie and Bah two women from different cultures that will learn to accept each other in a period where being friendly with the Indians was kind of dangerous. The fact that the main characters are women is a powerful narrating device in itself since in that time women had no rights.
The writing style is powerful and catching full of truth and fiction at the same time. Rush of Shadows will get the readers attention for its powerful prose and will keep the readers hook by the beautiful yet hard story of America´s history.
Meet Catherine Bell
Catherine
Bell grew up in a New England family with a sense of its past as distinguished
and its culture superior, as chronicled in many of her short stories. An
early reader, she found in fiction that penetrating experience of other
people's lives that opens a wider world. The Winsor School, Harvard, and
Stanford prepared her to recognize good writing and thinking. She credits
work as a gardener, cook, cashier, waitress, and schoolbus driver with teaching
her how to live in that wider world.
She
has also worked as a secretary, freelance writer, and therapist, served as a
teacher in the Peace Corps, and taught in inner city schools. She has
lived in Paris, Brasilia, Nova Scotia, Northern California, and Washington,
D.C. Culture clashes, even within families, are often subjects of her
fiction. She has published stories in a number of journals, including Midway
Journal, Coal City Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Sixfold,
Solstice, and South Carolina Review. Her story "Among
the Missing" won The Northern Virginia Review's 2014 Prose Award.
She
researched and wrote Rush of Shadows, her first novel, over a period of
twenty years after she married a fourth-generation Californian and fell in love
with his home territory, the Coast Range. The bright sunburned hills,
dark firs, clear shallow streams, and twisted oaks were splendid, but the old
barns and wooden churches and redwood train station didn't seem old
enough. Where was the long past? Where were the Indians?
There was only the shadow of a story passed down by her husband’s grandmother
late in life. Born in 1869, she grew up playing with Indian children
whose parents worked on the ranch her father managed. One day the Army
came to remove the Indians and march them to the reservation, and that was
that. She was four years old, and she never forgot.
Bell
lives with her husband in Washington, D.C. and visits children and
grandchildren in California and Australia. As a teacher at Washington
International School, she loves reading great books with teenagers.
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