Prisons: Book I of the Beulah Quintet

Shady Ave Reader provided an excellent review of this book, and it should also be read. I consciously seek to avoid repeating what is there to focus instead on my perspective on it as a reader. I will say one thing in particular about my reaction to that review: If this is truly not the best book in the series, I definitely get to look forward to some top-notch reading. That said: I'm normally very skeptical of historical fiction, because half of the genre is dominated by pretentious stuffed shirts who know their history well and have a snooze-inducing narrative voice, while the other half is populated by people who know next to nothing about history at all and appear determined to display that ignorance proudly with little time spent constructing a story. I also tend to be suspicious of any series of novels longer than three books because that is usually a pretty good sign the author's just writing whatever crap will sell without regard to crafting a quality story. Even worse, I tend to be profoundly reticent to invest any time in a story that crosses generations. There are exceptions to each of these cases where the trend is that I find only poorly written pablum, but to combine all three served to make me put off reading this book for a full year. Last Christmas, several of us gathered around the tree gave each other used books for Christmas. The idea is to help each other broaden our reading horizons so we don't fall into reading ruts, and we try new things. Prisons was one of the books I got. After struggling halfway through DH Lawrence's purple novel of spite and dull melodrama, Women In Love, before giving up on it, I was not motivated to touch Prisons. Finally, after this year's Christmas gathering was put on hold for weather, I decided to try reading Prisons before our delayed gathering. I'm glad I did. Early on I became even more skeptical of my likely enjoyment of the book, because the first half of it heavily uses a literary technique that is usually terribly abused and does nothing for a story: flashbacks. In fact, at first, the entire story was taking place in flashbacks. I was, however, slightly encouraged by the authenticity of the "present" events that framed the flashbacks -- the plodding life of a soldier on the road, strikingly familiar to me as an ex-soldier myself. A bit more encouragement came in the form of the evocative tone of the flashback text, the depth of characters, and eventually way all the various threads started to come together to be woven into a well-crafted first-person narrative. The fact it unapologetically makes use of a first-person perspective inside the character's head rather than tritely justifying by way of letters or journal entries the way lesser period novels such as The Illusionist did helped keep it from foundering as well. By the time I was halfway through this book, I had realized I was reading something quite remarkable in its craftsmanship. I don't want to go into detail