Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

"As the McAllans are being tested in every way, two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not: charming, handsome, and sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, comes home from fighting the Nazis with the shine of a war hero, only to face far more personal - and dangerous - battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. It is the unlikely friendship of these two brothers-in-arms, and the passions they arouse in others, that drive this debut novel. Mudbound reveals how everyone becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale, even as they strive for love and honor."--BOOK JACKET.

Good story with nice character parallels (2 husbands, 2 mothers, 2 soldiers) but a little two dimensional to be great.

Interesting and believable characters for the most part, and yet . . . the story seemed awfully familiar, the plot without surprise (it's not hard to guess even from knowing the premise what's going to happen), the dialogue not completely convincing. And maybe my biggest complaint is that agenda-driven fiction (here: racists are evil) is so hard to pull off. Kingsolver can do it, which is maybe why Jordan won Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize, but few others can. The character of Pappy is as flat as a character can be because he represents the evil racists. Henry, on the other hand, isn't a bad man, but he's interesting because he's still racist. Even Jamie isn't flawless.

I also didn't care for the multiple first person points of view. It made the narrative much too diffuse. Six of them? Or more? And I occasionally lost track of which section I was in, a danger with this approach.

Love it !
Book definitely has some amazing quotes :)

“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with “Chapter One: I Am Born, “ you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect.”

Tackling “race” relations in the American South can be treacherous, particularly when the author is white and writing from the black perspective. Anytime an author writes in the voice of another group (ethnic, gender, social class, et cetera), he better know what he is doing. Three of the six characters that Hillary Jordan gives voice to in her debut novel, Mudbound, come from a family of black sharecroppers, yet Jordan does an admirable job of creating original and culturally significant characters.

Through alternating voices, each fairly unique, Jordan offers a fresh look at an old—yet never trite—subject. While the social issues largely revolve around ethnicity, Jordan also addresses sexism, class division, war and the trauma from war. Against a well-painted landscape, the story of Mudbound unravels at a wonderful pace; when the climax drops, the reader feels as though he is living through the drama in real-time.

Some turns were a little too convenient—characters in the right place (or wrong place) at the right time, Points A, B, and C connecting too easily, and so forth—but it still worked. There were enough surprises and original takes on the subject that the story was largely believable.